Monday, September 5, 2016

Cloud Services : My Thoughts (Part 4)

My assignment this week is to "Research 3 Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers, and identify why they may be considered as potential PaaS providers for the current supply chain program."

and this is my response:

It is really hard to research 3 different Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) service providers when you don’t know what language and framework that the company wants to use for their applications.  Depending on the technologies that the company wants to use, there doesn’t seem to be many .NET solutions for PaaS services.  I am thinking that because there are more options for Ruby, Python, Java, PHP and Node.js than there is for .NET I might suggest that the company go with something like Java or PHP because those are the more common for web applications after .NET, and there seem to be a lot of PaaS service providers that have set ups for these languages.  With a PaaS all the company’s developers have to do is login to the Machine and they are ready to start developing applications for the cloud in the specific language and environment that they are set up with by the hosting service.

Personally I would like to go with the more popular providers and by that I mean the providers that are more well-known because they are leaders in the industry of information technology, Google and Amazon are the ones that first come to mind for me.  Something that I know about Amazon is that its product is not really a PaaS, it is more like an IaaS that a user can install whatever type of platform on the infrastructure that they want to use, so they could install a .NET framework onto the AWS infrastructure service which would kind of be like a PaaS situation.
Google App Engine is another viable option but it is limited to Java, Python, PHP and GO but Google App Engine also has a remarkable Datastore option.  All of the options given through the Google App Engine are guaranteed to be scalable.
The pricing for either of these options seems very reasonable, Google App Engine is based on usage and ranges from 5 cents an hour to 18 cents an hour depending on the product needed, and Amazon’s product supposedly has a nice calculator for figuring out what you will spend on your product.

Microsoft Azure is another PaaS provider, but they have sort of a niche because they are one of the big dogs and they seem to be one of the only ones that provide a .NET solution.  Just because Microsoft is the only one providing a .NET solution doesn’t mean that it is a mediocre, they offer a fantastic service with a wonderfully easy user interface that makes sense.  Azure’s prices are very reasonable as well based on how much processer time you use and the type of servers that you use.  Microsoft’s Azure is the provider that I currently use to house my personal website and the websites that I maintain for my customers and the pricing is very reasonable.

I think that I need to keep looking into these different cloud services because I do want to expand the services that I am providing to my customers and to expand into a new way of providing services to new customers in the future.

In the future I might set myself up with something that runs Ruby or Python or even Java so this would lead me to providers like Amazon and Google and their products. 

An idea that I have tossing around in my mind is creating some skills for the Amazon Echo that I won at the recent CodeStock event here in Knoxville, these "skills" are small applications that would need to be housed on a server somewhere, for convenience I think I could house these apps on Amazon AWS, although I could host the guts of these skills on any cloud.  Keep an Eye out for new Amazon Echo Skills from me and possibly a blog post to accompany it as well.