Understanding Cloud Infrastructure Service Options
It's important to understand what options various IaaS (infrastructure as a service) vendors offer, prior to committing to their particular solution, as they are certainly not all the same. Skipping this step can lead to an ugly case of vendor lock-in down the road, when a specific IaaS provider can no longer meet the infrastructure requirements of your growing business.
Avoiding vendor lock-in requires a review of the various options that are available from different IaaS providers, prior to the full scale adoption of their services across your enterprise. Analyzing the options offered by various IaaS vendors upfront can save your business money in the long run, by eliminating the necessity of future cloud migration, with its associated costs.
We've pulled together a short list of important options that you need to consider, when evaluating IaaS vendor solutions. The information provided below can help you decide which IaaS vendor(s) are most appropriate for your organization.
Scale Up / Scale Out – Some IaaS vendors have limited options available, when it comes to scaling the various instances that a subscriber may deploy. You should take an in depth look at the options for horizontal scaling (adding more instances) and vertical scaling (increasing the size of an instance), when evaluating a provider's services.
API Availability – Many IaaS vendors provide a number of API's that allow subscribers to programmatically control their enterprise infrastructure resources via custom programs. IaaS vendor API's support languages such as Java, PHP, Ruby, Pearl, Python, Bash and C#. API's are a must have feature for businesses that use IaaS capacity for commercial SaaS (software as a service) deployment.
Monitoring Services – While it's not always the case, most IaaS providers offer a reasonably functional set of monitoring tools for the cloud infrastructure services that they sell. This can help many organizations save money, by eliminating the need for a separate cloud monitoring service. It's important to realize, however, that you may still need to purchase cloud network monitoring services from a 3rd party company to get consolidated monitoring reports, when your business uses IaaS services provided by multiple vendors.
Instance Types – Different vendors offer various types and sizes of instances, which should be taken into consideration, prior to investing in a given IaaS provider's solution. Some of the available instance types include: Standard Instances, Micro Instances, High-Memory Instances, High-CPU Instances, Cluster Compute Instances, Cluster GPU Instances and High I/O Instances.
Evaluating the Options
Analyzing the differences in IaaS provider options doesn't end with the short list provided above. There are a number of additional factors which may impact the flexibility, performance, cost and overall value of a given IaaS solution. Some that you may wish to consider include: average pricing per month, SLA's (platform availability), data center availability/redundancy, certifications, support options, configuration options, free service tiers and inbound/outbound data transfer capacity.