Tuesday, April 27, 2010

SaaS Introduction with Examples - Cloud Service Model

I have been exploring what is known as the Cloud Stack (or Service Models) in my recent posts. My first post on this subject was Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS: Cloud Computing. IaaS is the base layer, the foundation of all cloud based applications. My second post discussed the middle layer of Cloud Stack, i.e., PaaS (Platform as a Service):Cloud Computing Platform Introduction – PaaS. This post introduces the top layer of cloud computing, i.e., SaaS (Software as a Service). This is the layer directly consumed by customers).

What is SaaS or Software as a Service?

SaaS-Introduction-Cloud-Computing

On-Premise applications are quite expensive, affordable only to big enterprises. Why? Because On-Premise applications have a very high upfront capital expenditure (CapEx); which results in a high total cost of ownership (TCO). On-Premise applications also require a higher number of skilled developers to maintain the application. In its current avatar SaaS is going to be the best bet for small and mid size businesses (SMEs/SMBs). Now, they can afford the best software solution for their businesses without investing anything at all on the infrastructure, development platform or skilled manpower. The sole requirement for SaaS is a computer with a browser, quite basic. SaaS is a recurring subscription based model delivered to the customer on demand – Pay as you use.

Why SaaS?

  • No upfront expenses.
  • You just need a web browser to access the application. No other hardware purchase or software installation is necessary.
  • Quick deployment or it’s already deployed and ready to use. Forget those sleepless nights of traditional application deployment - remember what happens when there’s a go-live at the production server!
  • Unlike the traditional apps, cloud architecture makes SaaS highly scalable.
  • Multi-tenant architecture makes SaaS highly efficient as the source code is the same for every customer.
  • Unlike traditional apps where customization is the key; a true SaaS can meet any requirement by simple configuration.
  • Upgrades are applied directly at the SaaS provider’s end. No headache at the customer end.
  • Since all the customers are using the same code base, any new tech-innovation is easily integrated by the provider, and is available for all the subscribers.

Who can use SaaS?

Apart for big enterprises who have multiple options, SaaS is a perfect solution for small and mid size businesses. Most  SMBs/SMEs have little or no legacy software to carry forward. They can subscribe to a SaaS just like subscribing to electricity or phone, and pay the provider on a monthly basis determined by their usage.

Which industry segment is better served by SaaS?

It can serve almost any software need. Currently you can find many SaaS players in the following:

  • CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
  • Collaboration Applications
  • Security

DeskAway Project 

ManagementHuman Resources (HR) can also make good use of SaaS. But there are a number of other segments that need affordable apps, and are not taking advantage of it. For example: If you are a developer, you’d gain an early mover advantage by developing a high quality low cost SaaS for schools.

Best SaaS Examples

Related Cloud Computing Articles  at Techno-Pulse

Monday, April 19, 2010

Cloud Computing Platform Introduction - PaaS

A few weeks back I wrote a post on Cloud Infrastructure as a Service – IaaS. To summarize that post, IaaS is the base layer of Cloud Computing, the foundation of cloud based applications. The whole cloud infrastructure, including servers, routers, hardware based load-balancing, firewalls, storage and other network equipment, is provided by the IaaS provider. IaaS delivers computer and web infrastructure through virtualization. But all this infrastructure is of no use without a platform. This post continues the series. Here we’ll discuss the middle layer of Could Stack, i.e., PaaS (Platform as a Service).This middle layer of cloud is consumed mainly by developers or tech savvy individuals.

Cloud-SaaS-PaaS-IaaS-Introduction

Traditional Software Development

Assume your company has got a web application development project. Using the traditional model, how will they proceed with the development if they want to develop it in say ASP.Net with a SQL Server database?

They will need to

  • Procure VS.Net developers license.
  • Procure SQL Server licenses.
  • Procure 3rd party tools (reporting etc) licenses.
  • Develop and then deploy on a production server on a fixed budget.

Though the above steps are costly and complicated yet they apply only to simple web apps (Because in real-time scenario there are a few more servers like test, staging and production)

Cloud based PaaS

Now you don’t need to invest millions of dollars to get that project environment ready for your developers. The PaaS provider will deliver the platform on the web, and in most cases you can consume the platform using your browser. There is no need to download any software. This combination of simplicity and cost efficiency empowers small and mid-size companies, or even individual developers, to launch their own Cloud SaaS. Without any initial investment, they can leverage the power of these platform providers.

PaaS  Layers

  • Cloud OS
  • Cloud Middleware

Google App Engine and Windows Azure are examples of Cloud Operating Systems (OS). OrangesScape and Wolf PaaS are cloud middleware.

PaaS-Layers-Cloud OS-Middleware

Examples: Best PaaS Providers

Microsoft Windows  Azure and Google App Engine are for hard-core developers. Existing .Net developers can easily move up to the Azure platform and create their own scalable Cloud SaaS. Java and Python developers can use Google Apps Engine to deliver cloud apps.

OrangeScape and Wolf PaaS are on-demand browser based platforms for rapidly designing and delivering multi-tenant Cloud SaaS apps. They can be used as a 5 GL platform which automates many standard software development tasks to simplify application development. The USP of these platforms is that they can be used by business analysts (non developers) as well. You don’t need to write one piece of code! With a little patience, anyone with good analytical ability and domain knowledge can get started with his or her first Cloud SaaS.

Let me know about your experience with any other PaaS provider you’ve used…

Related Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Cloud based on-Demand SaaS CRM for India: Impel

Techno-Pulse hosts Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam in an exclusive e-Mail Interview on Cloud Computing Services in general & SaaS in particular.Impel-CRM-SaaS-Cloud-India

Narasimhan (Kishore) Mandyam is CEO of PK4, a company that delivers SaaS CRM for India. Starting as a developer at Infosys in 1986, Kishore has built and run companies in software services and in products in India and the US. As Managing Director of Ampersand Software Applications Ltd., he helped build a Services company that spanned India, the US, Japan and Europe. As co-founder, he helped build and grow American technology companies like Aprisa Inc. and zeroCode Inc. In 2006, he co-founded PK4 with the objective of changing the way traditional software is built and sold. Impel CRM is the first large software system from that effort. Kishore is an Electrical Engineer from UVCE, Bangalore.

Let us meet the man behind Impel CRM: Perhaps the first well known India based SaaS CRM exclusively for Indian biz…

  • A NASSCOM-Zinnov study has predicted that Global Cloud opportunity (SaaS+IaaS+PaaS) is expected to exceed USD 30 billion by 2012. Emerging India’s next wave of growth in IT will be driven by SaaS companies. Being a leading Indian SaaS provider what’s your practical experience in Indian market?

Our experience has been amazing. We began with the typical trepidation that most SaaS providers go through in India - that everything from connectivity to "Mera data kahaan baithega" will be issues. But we very quickly learned that most Indian buyers fall into one of two categories - they either know enough to trust SaaS or they don't care. Over the last 12 months, we've added over 30 customers and lots and lots of users. And our customers have come from small, three-person shops in Srinagar to a large MNC brand like Bausch & Lomb.

  • Impel CRM is a SaaS  (Software as a Service). How do you compare  your SaaS offering, in terms of Security, SLA & Scalability, with more established global SaaS providers viz. Salesforce.com & SugarCRM?

That's an easy one - we're as good or better! :) Seriously, though, from some perspectives, we're NOT as deep. For example, we don't have fail-over servers in multiple countries, as Salesforce tells our prospects. But we have enough to be redundant to the fourth decimal in terms of risk. Our scalability has been terrific, primarily because the platform we use was used earlier to build large apps for social networks - think of the load there! Our security has been very strong - one of our customers is a European manufacturer who applies their home-country security standards here, too. And we've passed with flying colours.

  • Have you used any cloud based PaaS to build Impel CRM? Or is it built on your own platform.

Impel is built on this technology called zeroCode, a high-performance PaaS in every sense of that term - except that it is not marketed as such. zeroCode is "engine-based" in that "programs" are actually XML structures that are used to execute logic in a Java engine. So we get things like multi-tenancy and mega-tenancy from the get-go. And that happens automatically for every function we add as we go along, so that's a huge time-saver. Factors like security, scalability, robustness and tenancy are all part of the engine, so enhancements in those "infrastructural" areas, too, is centralized and quick to implement.

  • On-Demand – You’ve stressed a lot on this keyword in your product docs? What does it mean?

To me, it means at least the following things:

1. That a user can get to his/her app when s/he wants it, where s/he wants it, as long as s/he has a browser

2. That a customer can go from kicking the tyres to using it in the field in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months.

These are simple things to say, but they have very deep implications. For example, the second bullet implies a huge amount of configurability, simplicity of user-interface, applicability to their specific business culture, a simple billing model... I can go on. And the first one per force implies multi-tenancy, security, scalability and so on. Bringing all this together in a complex business application is what makes it On-Demand, IMHO.

  • What is the USP of Impel CRM SaaS?

It's Indian-ness. Or rather, its non-Western-ness. And I don't mean that in a country-of-origin sense but in an Applicability sense. The way people do business in India and non-American geographies is different - tomes have been written about that. A classic example is the fact that if your AC fails, someone will come home to fix it - try getting that kind of service in the US. On the other hand, try tracking that kind of labour in Salesforce - we can. There are a number of small things, too - SMS, for example - that seem technically simple to implement but, taken as a whole, make a huge difference to the customer. Not to mention our pricing - that's Indian, too!

  • Data Security & Privacy are the 2 most important concerns for SaaS based applications. In a recent press release on Mar 15:

Gartner study says that 60 percent of virtualized servers will be less secure than the physical servers they replace. But this is not because virtualization is inherently insecure, says Gartner’s Neil MacDonald. It’s because the people implementing this new, unfamiliar, technology aren’t doing it right.

  How are you addressing this issue?

Let me make one thing clear, the way we approach things: SaaS is not Virtualization. We DO use virtualized servers - EC2, our platform of choice, is such a mechanism after all - but that's transparent to a mega-tenanted app. IMHO - and I know some of our customers say this, too -the challenge to companies in terms of data security is not that their data is now on the Cloud but that they have a whole lot of users who, theoretically, can walk away with some of that any time. And this is an issue whether they buy our CRM or the owner's brother-in-law's VB app. Specifically about virtual servers, we're lucky that Amazon provides some of the gate-keeper security already. And we run our own firewalls and so on - all standardized, thanks to the Amazon AMI - to ensure app-level security.

  • Do you think SaaS will help to finally eliminate rampant software piracy specifically in emerging markets like India & China?

There's no doubt that SaaS obviates piracy, since there's no software to deliver. But honestly, a CRM vendor is rarely worried about Piracy - it is the Productivity apps and Financial Accounting apps that are pirated. And those going SaaS is some ways off. Also, look at it from, say, M$FT's perspective - someone going to Google Apps is WORSE than someone pirating Excel, since the latter is lost revenue but the former is revenue lost to a competitor. So piracy for them is actually not as bad as a SaaS alternative!

I think what WILL eliminate piracy is a better sense of value from a buyer's perspective, where customers see value in what's sitting on that CD more than the CD itself. That will happen, too, thanks to an improving economy, economies of scale dropping prices and so on.

  • Can you share some information on Impel CRM’s customers, specifically in Indian market?

We have a wide range of customers in India - we have small companies that trade in manufactured products, we have one of the world's best-known eyecare companies, we have India's most successful stem-cell banking company. We have a couple of call-centers (thanks to our deep integration with open-source IP PBXs) - quite a variety. And that's because of the way we sell - we don't. We don't chase specific verticals or types of customers - prospects find us, thanks to our marketing and advertising.

  • An In-premise CRM application can be developed on Java or .Net platform within a period of approx.  5 months with 5 developers. It’s a one-time investment & the customer has the ownership of the application. The break-even point can be achieved in a year or so. Why should a business opt for a model where he has to pay a subscription fee every month? What happens to the Operational Expenses in long run?

I won't comment about whether a system of the complexity of Impel can be built in 25 person-months, or that development is the only major cost of a software app. In fact, there are very clear studies that up-front costs are less than 30% of the lifetime-cost of software - and that does not even talk about servers, administration, management, etc. But that's not the point for most companies. Going by that argument, you can build your own car, you can build your own building, your own AC - you don't do that (normally!). Because the hassles of managing an effort like that far outweigh the benefits. Not to mention the value of starting to use the app TODAY against the HUGE uncertainty of ever completing a development project. But the real value - specifically of SaaS vs. any other model - is the CONTINUING growth in value for a customer. Without having to worry about people's motivations and whether an Accenture wants to hire away your best programmer, you now have a growing set of functions delivered every few weeks, painlessly and consistently. It's like buying a Tata Magic and that magically turning into a Globus as your business grows - now, that's something you just can't beat!

The point about Operational Expenses is similar: we can construct very clear matrices that show you how SaaS is only as expensive or less than in-premise or (Aaaargh!) development. But that misses the point: what Opex value do you put on something that GROWS with your business, just ahead of your need?

Honestly, when we come up against a prospect that talks of this comparison, we walk away. Because you can't argue Cost issues against Value issues.

  • Feb 2009, Salesforce.com became the 1st enterprise cloud company to hit $1 billion in annual revenues. In near future, do you foresee any India based Cloud Provider dominating the global IT space?

I don't know what “near future” means - remember that SFDC took five years and over $ 100 MN to become MARGINALLY profitable, ten years to get to 1 BN. If the question is: "Do I see an India-based Cloud provider hitting $ 1 BN in ten years?", the answer is an unequivocal Yes. And by the way, I believe we (I mean Impel CRM) can do that in less time than that! :)

Techno-Pulse wishes Kishore & his team  All the Best…

Related Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Develop Cloud based SaaS Applications on Wolf Platform

Wolf-Director-Sunny-Ghosh

Techno-Pulse hosts Sunny Ghosh, Director Wolf Frameworks, in an exclusive e-Mail Interview on Cloud Computing Services in general & PaaS in particular.

Sunny is responsible for developing & evangelizing the business model embedded inside the WOLF Platform. A subject matter expert in software application platforms, he brings tremendous working experience with Enterprises/SME's from more than 35 countries and is a seasoned startup specialist. A COBOL, RPG, CL programmer by origin, with strong career foundation with Motorola, sunny started his career in the Telecom domain & holds an honors degree in Mathematics with specialization in Competitive Product Strategies, Intellectual Capital & Software Business Management from NSRCEL, IIM-Bangalore. A voracious reader, core committee member of the prestigious CII - Knowledge Management Community of India, he has published series of papers on how Digital edge empowers large Diasporas & communities, “Mobilizing knowledge management towards digital rights” in assistance from World Bank & UNPAN and dreams of a world filled with choice, service, freedom and optimism.

Q & A…

  • PaaS (Platform as a Service) is a relatively new concept; May be there are not more than 10 well known PaaS providers in the world. What made you dare to think beyond IT services & outsourcing – the prevalent trend in India?

Sunny: Product and services are two sides of the same coin. India has established its global dominance in IT services and to break the ceiling, product development is an obvious transition. What does every product company want to do? Introduce a service around their product and ask any services company, they too want to develop product/IP/Framework to differentiate themselves from everyone. This is natural to me. What’s really unique is why Platform-as-a-Service?
Having spent 15 plus years in the software industry and working with some of best products and minds across the world, we could visualize:

  1. An entire new generation of customers/users waiting to leverage computing in ways not possible with earlier technology.
  2. The end of ‘Fashion-IT’ – customers will only pay for value and not technology. 
  3. Global dominance of the Internet, return of the centralization/scale of economies and services industry.
  4. Most importantly – ‘Innovation’ as a means to fuel economic growth.

What Microsoft Access did to the PC world, WOLF Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is doing to the browser world. Making your ideas, processes and business applications go online as web applications with a few clicks and with limited technology & budget constraints. From concept to creation and cash within days!

  • Finally the Indian Elephant is dancing & India is emerging as an Economic Power House. What is the Cloud Computing implementation scene in India specifically for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)? Do you see it as a big opportunity for PaaS providers like you?

Sunny: WOLF Platform has a lot to offer to the 35 million plus SMB’s in India, who are growing a lot faster than their counterparts in other parts of the world. They are moving from people based businesses to process based organizations and the ability to develop, access or use from simple automated applications to customized business applications is the need of the hour.

Many of our partners are developing SaaS applications on top of WOLF which are more targeted towards SMB’s. In general, PaaS takes the complexity out of IT and helps the small to medium businesses to use affordable solutions.

In fact, “Design and deliver applications which work the way your business does” is our core mantra and clearly SMB’s stand to benefit the most from our present offering.

  • How do you compare Wolf PaaS (Platform as a Service) with the more established platform from bigger players like Microsoft’s Windows Azure & Google’s App Engine?

Sunny: WOLF is a rapid application development and delivery platform, equivalent to Microsoft Access TM on the internet. We help to develop online applications 70 percent faster at less than half the cost and use raw infrastructure, computing power and a cloud OS such as Microsoft Azure underneath. While Google App Engine and Windows Azure are ideal for developers, WOLF is ideal for power users & business analysts and works as a zero-code middleware which hides all the complexities for the user.

  • How can Wolf PaaS provide an alternate platform to small & mid size IT companies who are developing enterprise wide applications on Java & .Net platform?

Sunny: WOLF is a 5GL platform which automates many standard software development methods to simplify business application design and development.

Consider us as a browser based design framework -- layer of abstraction on top of .NET or Java with lots of flexibility to create sophisticated applications. You get On-Demand scalable infrastructure + storage, complete database, business rules engine, presentation/UI templates, Billing and the capability to integrate with other Cloud services or On-Premise software applications via ready API’s.

All this and priced on a pay-per-use model? In other words, here’s your software stack without the cost and complexity of buying or maintaining for empowering your customer services – ready to fire!

  • Can you share some information on Wolf PaaS customers specifically in Indian market?

Sunny: WOLF is used by many small and large organizations in India; Juice Junction, Delhi Freight Carriers, PeopleLogic, EMR, Wipro, Kreeo, eCounting and GMR are some of them.

  • Data Security & Privacy is a big concern for the Cloud hosted applications. How are you addressing this issue?

Sunny: If we compare the security of a Cloud vendor to a business that runs and maintains its IT in-house, it is important to keep in mind that a Cloud vendor like WOLF considers security, customer privacy, data backups and risk mitigation as a part of our core service offering.

While offering standard security features such as SSL encryption, we also strive to implement robust (and often multiple) security measures that match or even exceed current industry standards. A similar security arrangement by a business would be prohibitive in terms of time, cost as well as from the implementation skills perspective. It’s almost like saying the Formula One Ferrari Team is managing & servicing our vehicle and applications these days :-)

  • Let us assume I’ve developed a SaaS (Software as a Service) using Wolf PaaS. Can I deploy my SaaS on any other Cloud Provider? In brief, how are you addressing Vendor-Lock-In issue?

Sunny: From the onset, WOLF has been architected keeping openness and standards in mind. With complete AJAX on the frontend and a robust XML backbone that enables bidirectional communication with On-Premise & other Cloud based apps, WOLF is more inclined towards a vision where our users can leverage cross-platform application interoperability & data usage.

A SaaS application created on WOLF can be deployed and run from any private cloud or server. And this is not enough when it comes to vendor lock-in:

  1. Allowing users to extract their application design in a highly portable XML format is a major offering from WOLF towards interoperability.
  2. Extract and save complete application data at the click of a button – anytime, anywhere.
  • To design applications on Wolf PaaS, one only needs to have a functional knowledge, No programming skill (coding) is required. Basically your framework has 4 wolf designer controls -- Entity, Navigation, Rules & Reporting designer. What’s happening behind the scene? Which database are you using?

Sunny: The WOLF platform automates many tedious and mundane steps of software development while also providing better control and higher flexibility to customize & develop your online business application. Our business analyst and evangelist community love the way in which complete applications, database-business rules and reporting functions are created with those simple controls with just configurations.

WOLF delivers its On-Demand version with MySQL database and if you decide to deploy your application On-Premise – you can even select Microsoft SQL Server as your database.

  • What is the USP of Wolf PaaS apart from its unique name?

Sunny: “Design and deliver robust web applications 70 percent faster at less than half the cost” is our core mantra and we believe that “Software is only consequential”

  • Google, Microsoft & Amazon are betting heavily on Cloud Computing as the next step in the Internet's evolution. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, the Cloud will wind up "being the place of innovation that lets us pull our lives together the way we want to, to touch people the way we want to [and] to find people when and how, and [in] the way we want to." Do you think the Cloud Computing will catapult the small but innovative creator to the big league in a short period of time?

Sunny: Web 1.0 was all about killer internet applications such as eBay, amazon.com, Google.com, Yahoo, etc – where everyone had access. The Web 2.0 was all about user generated content, social networking and AJAX where everyone could contribute. With the advent of Web 3.0 or Cloud Computing or platforms such as WOLF, what we are witnessing is that everyone can innovate. So yes, Cloud computing will turn the tables and fire up innovation and consumerism to the scale never seen before…

  • Today the Indian IT space is dominated by companies from services sector. A few experts believe that if the big IT players don’t get their Cloud Computing strategies right, they may be in for a rude shock as the SaaS & PaaS providers may dent heavily into their revenue. What are your views?

Sunny: The nature of the Cloud enables rapid delivery of services, optimal utilization of computing resources and significant time, cost & effort benefits.

Going forward, IT and ITES companies will need to recognize and exploit these features of the Cloud to offer:

  1. A strong value proposition to their customers
  2. Gain a competitive advantage.

IT companies are slowly becoming aware of this and already there are signs of Cloud strategies in their roadmaps.

  • 5 years down the line, do you foresee any Cloud Provider (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) dominating the Indian IT space?

Sunny: Amazon is a true innovator and I believe that they are an IaaS player to watch out for in this space. I foresee WOLF as one of the major contenders in the PaaS/application development platform player for IT services and overall businesses. (Disclaimer: Shameless self-promotion :-) )

Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse

Monday, April 5, 2010

Infrastructure as a Service - IaaS: Cloud Computing

Until the year 2009 Cloud Computing was a hype. But now it has definitely lived up to the hype and moved beyond it. Gartner’s Strategic Planning Hypothesis predicts that, by 2012, about 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies will use Cloud Computing Service in some fashion.

Let us discuss what constitutes cloud computing. Cloud Computing can be broadly classified into three *aaS, i.e., three layers of Cloud Stack, also known as Cloud Service Models or SPI Service Model:

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
  • Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
  • Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

We can simplify this structure to represent it in a Stacked Venn diagram as follows:

Cloud SaaS PaaS IaaS

In general terms, Internet and Cloud can mean the same thing. They are shown here as two layers because the Internet is quite broader than the cloud.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

This is the base layer of the cloud stack. It serves as a foundation for the other two layers, for their execution. The keyword behind this stack is Virtualization. Amazon EC2 is a good example of an IaaS. In Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) your application will be executed on a virtual computer ( also known as an instance). You have your choice of virtual computer, meaning that you can select a configuration of CPU, memory and storage that is optimal for your application. The IaaS provider supplies the whole cloud infrastructure viz. servers, routers, hardware based load-balancing, firewalls, storage and other network equipment. The customer buys these resources as a service on an as needed basis.

A few of you may claim that this sounds somewhat similar to what the customers were doing even 10 years back with traditional hosting. So what you can do now with an IaaS that you could not before? How is it different from traditional hosting services?

Why should companies opt for IaaS ?

  • The billing is on hourly or monthly basis. You pay only for the resources your actually consume. This is unlike the traditional services where you pay a fixed amount even if you don’t use the resources, or don’t have enough clients to consume the preconfigured resources. In cloud computing, i.e., IaaS, you pay less if you have a lower customer base and vice-versa. Sounds quite rational!
  • Cloud is elastic in nature, i.e., you can control the number of resources you use at any given point in time. Compare this with traditional hosting, where you rent a fixed number of resources for fixed amount of time. Using IaaS you can easily configure your resources for unexpected spikes in traffic. Based on your computing requirements and configuration, your IaaS provider can respond quickly to scale up or down. Amazon EC2 calls it Auto Scaling. This is suitable for applications that undergo quite unpredictable spikes in traffic on an hourly, daily or weekly basis; they will now have the resources they need On-Demand!
  • One more feature I liked about Amazon EC2, which is perhaps provided by other IaaS providers as well, is Elastic Load Balancing. This feature auto-distributes an application’s incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances (virtual computers).
  • The Amazon EC2 SLA (Service Level Agreement) guarantees 99.95% availability of the service within a region over a trailing 365 day period. GoGrid has the most generous SLA with a guarantee of 100% Uptime and 24/7 Support.
  • How quickly can you scale up or scale down your capacity? An Amazon EC2 customer can increase or decrease capacity within minutes. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. This is true for other IaaS providers as well. One Rackspace client told me that he can spin up new servers in seconds!

Details of the remaining two layers of Cloud Stack i.e. PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) & SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will be covered in another post. Keep following…

Related Cloud Computing Articles at Techno-Pulse