Compare Cloud Computing And cloud Service Providers
Introduction:
Cloud computing means the delivery of several hosted services over Internet. Cloud computing enables everyone including companies, individuals, and groups to consume and compute several resources as a utility like electricity instead of having and build or maintain a computing infrastructure in-house.
There are a lot of cloud service providers in the market providing the facilities of cloud computing and they are providing a numerous number of services which are of very much benefit for the users. In this report we will be covering the different cloud service providers which are currently involved in the market and are providing services I the field of cloud computing.
The cloud service providers which we will be covering are IBM, Amazon and Google. We will now see the vast range of services they are providing in their plans for cloud computing and hoe the completion is growing rapidly in the cloud market. Then it will be focused in hoe the market completion is switching from price to utilities and hoe the companies are trying to grow the number of services so as to strengthen their foot in market and to take control over it. There are a lot of benefits that the cloud computing offers over the normal hardware computing and its flexibility. Some of these befits of cloud computing are mentioned ahead.
Benefits:
Cloud computing has several benefits for any businesses or end users. Three of those main benefits that cloud computing has include:
- Elasticity: Companies may scale up as the computing needs increase and may also scale down again as need decrease.
- Self-service provisioning: End users may spin up the computing resources for any type of work on-demand.
- Pay per use: Payment is made or the cost is calculated based on the use only.
Cloud computing services can be private, public or hybrid.
Private cloud services are those which are delivered from a data center to all internal users. This model offer a versatility and convenience, while the preserving management or control and security. Internal customers may be or may not be accounted or billed for the services through the IT charge back.
Where as in the public cloud model, the third-party provider may delivers the clouds service over Internet. Customers only needs to pay for the CPU cycles or the storage or the bandwidth they will consume.
Hybrid cloud is basically a combination of both the public cloud services and the private cloud services. With the benefits of both and trying to avoid the limitations of both and clubbing the benefits of both.
Some of the leading public cloud providers are
1.IBM and Soft-Layer
2.Amazon Web Services (AWS)
3.Google Compute Engine or Google Cloud Platform
All these providers offer different type of services and with different pricing structures. Some of the services are free while most of the services are paid and the rate may differ from requirements to requirements.
The AWS Pricing Philosophy
AWS’ pricing philosophy is basically driven by the virtuous cycle. AWS’ value based pricing policies may reduces the barriers to the entry into the cloud. This in return may means more than the AWS customers that this drive more in the AWS usage. More the AWS usage will drives the greater the infrastructure and R&D will spend, which will give the AWS significant economy of the scales .Thereby by lowering the infrastructure cost and by allowing the AWS to pass the savings and continue the innovation on to various customers.
AWS basically try to constantly focus on the improvement of operational efficiencies and to reduce the data center infrastructure costs. These optimizations of AWS growing economies of scale will result in passing savings.
AWS Cloud Pricing Principles
AWS offers the customer a simple, and a pay-as-you-go pricing policy for over a 50 cloud services. With the AWS the customer will only pay for the services he need and for as long as he will use them or with a no long-term of contracts.
The AWS pricing is basically based on every individual’s service so the customer will only pay for what he will use, and not for the dependencies or the complex licensing and the termination fees.
Architecture
The Policies:
AWS offers a variety of cloud computing services. For every service, customer need to pay for exactly the amount of services/resources you need. This utility of style pricing model is detailed and explained below:
Pay-As-You-Go
With AWS the customer will purchase services only if he need them and only for time he need it. He will only pay for that and not for other things.
Reduce Costs
The AWS helps the customer to reduce or to eliminate the capital of intensive investments like hardware and the facilities while being significantly curtailing the overhead costs in the management and the maintenance.
Optimize Planning
AWS can empowers the customer to change the capacity of requirements or reserve to pay less and to participate in Spot market. This drives get efficiencies by shifting it from the forecast-model to the demand-driven model.
Pay in Local Currency
The AWS can supports local currency payments as well so as to avoid the customer’s trouble for payment support issues.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION:
Pay as you go:
In this no minimum commitments or any long-term contracts is required. You only need to replace your upfront the capital expenses with the low variable costs and only pay for what you need to use. No need to pay for the upfront for the excess capacity or to get any penalized for under-planning. For computing resources, you only pay on an hour basis i.e. from the time that you will launch any resource until the time you will terminate it. For any data storage or the transfer, you will pay on gigabyte basis. The charging will based on the underlying of infrastructure and the services that you will consume.
Pay less when you reserve:
For any certain product, customer may invest in any reserved capacity and can get a significant discounted hour rate, which may result in an overall savings of up to 60% (that depends on the type of instance that will be reserve) over on an equivalent on demand capacity.
Pay even less per unit by using more:
The customer can save more as they grow bigger. For example the storage and the data transfer and the pricing is tiered. The more the customer will use, the less he needs to pay for per gigabyte. For the compute, the customer will get a volume discounts of up to 10% when you will reserve more.
Pay even less as AWS grows:
Most importantly, company is constantly focused on the scheme of reducing the data center hardware costs and improving the operational efficiencies or lowering the power consumption and in general lowering the cost of the business. These optimizations with AWS’s substantial & growing economies of scale are resulting in the passing of saving back to the customer in the form of lowering the pricing.
Some services with NO extra charge:
- Amazon VPC: The Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud. It lets you to provision the logically isolated section of (AWS) Amazon Web Services Cloud where the customer can launch the AWS resources in the virtual network that he will define.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk: The AWS Elastic Beanstalk is easier way for the customer to quickly deploy or to manage any applications in the AWS cloud.
- AWS Cloud Formation: The AWS Cloud Formation gives the developers and the systems administrators a way to create the collection of the related AWS resources and to provision them in any orderly or predictable fashion.
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM): The AWS IAM can controls the customer’ access to the AWS services and the resources.
Graphical Explanation of policies:
Pay-As-You-Go
Pay Less/Unit by Using More
Pay Less When You Reserve
For some certain services like the Amazon EC2 & Amazon RDS, the customer can invest in reserved capacity. In this case, the customer can pay a low cost or upfront fee and to get the significant discounted hour rate which may result in an overall saving of up to as high as 60% over the equivalent on demand capacity.
Fundamental Pricing Components:
There are three main strategies and components for how you will pay for AWS that are compute or storage and data transfer out. These principles are slightly different depending on AWS product type customers are using. However fundamentally they are there core drivers that can have greatest impact on the customer’ AWS costs.
Storage
- Tiered Pricing
- Pay by GB
- Pay-for-performance option for block storage
- Cheaper storage at lower redundancy
Compute
- Multiple combinations of OS, cores, RAM, local storage
- Pay for compute time by the hour
- Volume Discounts
- On Demand, Dedicated, Reserved, and Spot Instances
Data Transfer
- Tiered Pricing.
- Minimal charge for data transfer within the same region
- Pay per GB for data out, no charge for inbound data
- Bandwidth aggregated across all services.
IBM Blue-Mix:
IBM cloud computing uses a set of many cloud computing services for the business offered by (IT) information technology company IBM. All these offerings are used to be marketed as and under the name of IBM Smart Cloud. IBM cloud including an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or software as a service (SaaS) and also the platform as a service (PaaS) which are offered through the public, private and hybrid cloud of delivery models and in an addition to components that can make up those clouds.
Bluemix is an IBM’s open cloud platform which is based on the open standards foundations. Cloud Foundry provides the developers access to the IBM’s software for the integration or security of transactions and some other key functions, as well as the softwares from the business partners. As its result they can also help the developers to connect two or more broad categories of systems in the cloud environment. System of the record such as the core banking and the accounting systems and those systems of engagement as mobile or situational and social apps.
Bluemix, is an IBM’s Platform based Service, which offers a cloud-based “DevOps” named services enabling the developers to develop and deliver projects rapidly which is faster and more efficiently. The Blue-mix plans play it big in growing start-ups of ecosystem in India this year. Through entering the business partnerships with the local accelerators or any start-ups.
IBM’s BlueMix had add to the already grown ecosystem of other platforms like Microsoft’s Azure or Google’s cloud platform and Amazon’s platform, all of which are already being used by the corporations throughout their startup accelerators and in their entrepreneurship programs to developers of India.
IBM offers many cloud delivery options which includes solely private cloud or public cloud and the variations between. The Private, public and the hybrid clouds are not as strictly distinct as the IBM allows its option to build the customized cloud solution from a combination of public and private cloud elements. The Companies that usually prefers to keep all their data and processes behind the firewall of theirs can also use private cloud services which are managed by their IT staff. An individual or a company can also choose between pay-as-you-go pricing.
The Hybrid cloud options may also allow some of the processes to be hosted & managed thoroughly by IBM. While some others may be kept on the private cloud or On VPN or any VLAN. The IBM also offer many plans for planning and consultation during the whole deployment process.
IBM basically offers five cloud provisional models:
- Private cloud( owned and operated by the customer)
- Private cloud,( owned and operated by IBM or another provider)
- Private cloud( owned by the customer, but operated by IBM or another provider)
- Public cloud services (based on the provision of functions to individuals)
- Virtual private cloud services (based on multi-tenanted support for individual enterprises)
Services provided by Blue-mix are categorized in these categories which are further classified into resources:
- Cognitive Solutions
- IoT Solutions
- Data Analytics
- Web Services
- Hybrid Cloud Solutions
- Open Architecture Solutions
- Networks
- Mobile Solutions
Basic Plans for IBM Startups and services.
Some of the Basic and most popular services which are provided By the IBM’s Blue-Mix platform are:
Personality Insights
It uses a linguistic analytic for extracting a set of personal and social traits that are from the way a person can communicates.
Cloud
It fully manages NoSQL and JSON’ database on platform used for the demanding of web and the mobile workloads.
Data-Works
Leverages are a set of APIs that may implement the standard REST model. Then these APIs can allow you for interoperating with feature.
Internet of Things
It provides a very simple but a powerful application for access to IoT devices and the data.
Static Analyzer
It brings the power of a static application and security testing to cloud.
Mobile Analyzer for iOS
It brings the proven power of any App Scan to the iOS mobile applications with identified security issues of user’ iOS application.
Push Notifications
They helps to send a push notifications to the mobile devices. The devices can also be targeted by using some tags or some device’ identifier.
Mobile Client Access
Finely tuning the mobile applications with the operational analytics of real time performance with data usage and secured communication path.
Workload Scheduler
It does not matter how complex the customer’ workload is either a single event or any sequence of complex procedures it can define the list for the actions to be performed.
Pricing Model:
IBM basically provides 3 plans for its cloud usage
1.For Starters/Startups
2.For Medium Business
3.For large enterprises
Google Cloud Platform:
Google Cloud Platform is another platform for cloud computing developed by Google which offers a hosting supporting infrastructure which Google uses for internal and for end to user products like the Google
SearchorYouTube. Cloud Platforms provide the developing products for building a wide range of programs or apps from simple and basic websites to any complex applications.
(GCP) Google Cloud Platform is a small part of suite in
the enterprise solutions by Google for Work and it provides a set of modular and cloud-based services with hosting of many development tools. For example cloud storage, hosting and computing, translations APIs, data storage and the prediction APIs.
Services Offered:-
The fields in which Google cloud computing deals are:
- Compute
- Networking
- Sub-Services
- Management
- Big Data
- Storage
COMPUTE
1.COMPUTE ENGINE–>It Runs a large-scale of workloads on the virtual machines which are hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
2.PREEMPTIBLE VMS–>The Preempt able VMs are some low cost choices for the distributed and the fault-tolerant workloads networks.
3.APP ENGINE–>It is a platform used for building the scalable web apps and some mobile backends.
4.CONTAINER ENGINE–>It Runs the Dockers container on the Google’s infrastructure which is powered by The KUBERNETS.
STORAGE
1.CLOUD STORAGE–>It is a Powerful 7 simple with cost effective type of object storage services in the global edge caching.
2.NEARLINE–>Also a highly available and easily affordable solution for the backup or archiving issues and disaster recovery cases.
3.CLOUD SQL–>It Stores and manages the data using a fully manageable MySQL database.
4.BIGTABLE–>The Cloud Big-table is a very fast with fully managed and massively scalable NoSQL providing database service.
NETWORKING
1.CLOUD NETWORKING–>It Connects the customer’ network to the Google directly through a carrier or any other n/w using a secure VPN service.
BIG DATA
1.BIGQUERY–>It Analyze the Big Data in cloud. It runs very fast and SQLlike queries.
2.DATAFLOW–>The Dataflow is real-times data processing service.
SERVICES
- 1.TRANSLATE API–>IT Create many multilingual apps and translate the text into some other languages via programs steps.
- CLOUD ENDPOINTS–>They Creates a Rest-full of services from the code and make them easily accessible to all iOS and Android and Java-script clients which are using the App Engine.
MANAGEMENT
- 1.CLOUD MONITORING
- 2.CLOUD DEPLOYMENT MANAGER
- 3.CLOUD LOGGING
Conclusion:
So the cloud computing is a great service and the customers are probably already using it. But there is a huge combat between the cloud service providers too for achieving a greater share in the market. They have made a variety of services to be provided to the users so as to attract them towards their product and that includes a lot of free services like cloud storage, app development, deployment so we can say that are providing the services from bottom level to top level and at a reasonable price which the customer can easily afford and it has been of so much benefits to the corporate world specially where the needs tend to change frequently and fast. So cloud computing provides a better and a flexible way to use resources online at a fairly economical rates.
There are a lot of cloud service providers providing these services In the market and are having a tough competition in terms of price and usage, but as the trend to cloud computing is growing rapidly the more people or better called customers are coming the market to take advantages of its service the more completion will grow.
In the coming time the completion may keep the aspects of price aside and be truly become the completion of utilities or the services the more services a vendor will provide the more will be its chances grow to rule the cloud market and IBM; blue-mix is a very big step in this context seeing at the no of services it is providing it is clear that the cloud service providers too know the values of utilities over price and they are trying to achieve it too. So it is hoped that the trend will grow as it is as the ones who will be befitted through this are customers and there are also chances of other cloud service providers stepping into the market.
References:
“Announcing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – beta”. Amazon.com. 2006-08-24.
“Cloud Computing: Clash of the clouds”.The Economist. 2009-10-15.
“IBM Cloud Computing”. IBM. July 22 2011
“What is Cloud Computing by Amazon Web Services | AWS”
