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What are the advantages of buying cloud infrastructure directly rather than indirectly through companies like AppFog, PiCloud, SimpleWorker, etc?
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Managing Cloud Spend, Maximizing ROI
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3 Answers
You don't need to hire ops people or know anything about operations. Great opportunity for small startups or other orgs that want 100% of their weight behind product innovation instead of infrastructure.
This is a nice article on the subject (Paas is the "monestery" model in this article)
http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/01/the_five_stages_of_hosting/
Except:
Good: Skilled beardos toiling behind the scenes make sure everything Just Works. As long as your application obeys the commandments, you can have faith that it will endure any trial. Prototypes are fast and easy to build, and all you have to do to turn them into production services is add money. You don't have to spend any time worrying about backups, load balancing, configuration, hardware, or anything except your app.
Bad: You have to design your app in a very specific way, and learn the holy texts by heart. If you decide to convert to another service, or become an apostate and run things yourself, you'll find yourself having to rebuild from the foundations. Of course, being a programmer it will be more tempting to just create your own application platform instead. All this abstraction is expensive, and it can be hard to estimate cost ahead of time. It's also easy to rack up significant fees if you don't pay attention. You are vulnerable to sudden changes in the pricing model.
If performance and uptime are part of your competitive advantage you probably don't want to outsource them to any PaaS.
You may also be running legacy apps that require you to 'throw hardware' at your problem which a PaaS may struggle to support.
Interesting perspective--direct vs. indirect IaaS--never quite looked at this way. PaaS is differentiated because you're operating at a different level of operations. If you need control over the deployment environment then you would acquire IaaS. If you're looking for a platform that will provide scalability and elasticity for your application, then you would probably consider a PaaS. If you're goal is the latter and you acquire IaaS, you will be responsible for "re-inventing the wheel" so to speak to deploy your application and now you're responsible for performance and scalability.
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