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Choosing from the major Platform-as-a-Service providers

By Roger Jennings, Contributor, SearchCloudComputing.com 28-Feb-2011

Platform-as-a-Service is the preferred cloud computing approach for many -- if not most -- organizations, as it frees software developers and IT operatives from infrastructure management chores, security concerns and licensing issues.

Amazon's new Elastic Beanstalk service, albeit in a beta version, enables Amazon Web Services to join Google and Microsoft in forming a triumvirate of top-tier Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers. These organizations readily pass most governance standards established by upper-level management and boards of directors for IT vendors, such as the following:

Financial stability to support large-scale capital investment in multiple data centers, without the risk of hostile or friendly takeovers by telcos or anyone else that might require finding a new cloud service provider.

Geographically dispersed data centers to enable disaster recovery with replicated applications and data.

Audit certifications to attest conformance to ISO/IEC 27001 for information security management and SAS 70 Type I and Type II for IT controls and control objectives.

Service level agreements (SLAs) to guarantee application (compute) and data (storage) availability. (It should be noted that PaaS SLAs provide minimal compensation for exceeding downtime limits.)
The following chart describes how the three cloud platform providers stack up in the preceding categories, based on publicly available data as of mid-January 2011:

Category

Amazon (BeanStalk)

Google (App Engine)

Microsoft (Azure)

Total assets, US$

$18,797,000

$57,851,000

$59,684,000

Market capitalization, US$

$85.81 billion

$200.96 billion

$227.96 billion

Data centers, US

Northern CA; Northern VA

Berkeley County, SC; Council Bluffs, IA; Lenoir, NC; Mayes County, OK (2011); The Dalles, OR

Chicago, IL; 
San Antonio, TX;
Quincy, WA(2011); 
Boydton, VA (2011?)

Data centers, overseas

Ireland, Singapore

Hamina, Finland (2011); St. Ghislain, Belgium

Dublin;
Amsterdam;
Singapore; 
Hong Kong

Audit certifications

SAS 70 Type II

None for Google App Engine*

ISO/IEC 27001:2005;
SAS 70 Type I and II

SLA, uptime %

99.95% (EC2)
99.9% (S3, CDN)

99.9% (Google App Engine for Business** only)

99.95% (Compute)
***
99.9% (Storage and SQL Azure)

No- or low-cost trial versions

See my tip on free cloud computing services for details on Amazon, Google and Microsoft trial offers

 

 

* Google's SAS 70 Type II certification for Google Apps doesn't appear to apply to Google App Engine.
** Google App Engine for Business was in the preview stage at press time.
*** Windows Azure's compute SLA requires a minimum of two instances running.


First published on SearchCloudComputing.com


Tags:
Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google, Microsoft, PaaS




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