Ten Scenarios to go cloud

 

With everyone speaking about cloud and talking about developing applications, sometimes it is confusing to identify if our application really needs to be on the cloud.

If you are an ISV, the answer may be relatively simpler (of course after reading my previous blog  :-) )

If you are looking to develop an application to solve a Business problem or if you are looking to automate any of your business process, the first thing that comes to our mind as of today is, should be develop this on the cloud or are we fine keeping the software on premise.

The purpose of this blog is to provide ten most common scenarios where it may be wise to use the Cloud computing to develop the applications. Please note that these are NOT THE ONLY scenarios for exploiting the cloud platforms. The benefits of cost & maintainability do not form the part of this discussion.

1) SaaS offering

As mentioned in my previous blog, if you are an ISV, then you may want to offer your product as a SaaS rather than selling it as an on premise application. There are various business & technical benefits in doing so, but this is a complete chapter in itself. Developing a SaaS based application from ground up, or building it using a PaaS is again a different discussion. But surely a SaaS is a cloud offering in itself or / and may be build using a PaaS which is also a cloud offering.

2) Scalable Web Application

If you have a very large web application for your enterprise or planning to develop one  or if you have an e-commerce site and it needs to be highly scalable (as scalable as a SaaS application), this can be an ideal candidate for going cloud using a PaaS. PaaS provides flexibility of provisioning for spikes in user load. It provides a cost effective way of using more servers and load balance during load and can get back to minimum configuration when the load goes down. Moreover because PaaS or for that matter even IaaS is offered on pay per use basis, it saves a lot of maintenance as well as operational cost.

3) Dynamic requirement of resources

If you have a requirement for large number of resources and the need for the same is highly dynamic, then the best option would be to accomplish the same using a IaaS. E.g. Assume there is a need is to build a data replication tool and lets assume you may want to test the tool to ensure that data is replicated smoothly across 100 servers. A huge amount of investment has to be made to buy a 100 servers and if you are not able to justify the spend or having a 100% utilisation of each one of them, then its a huge hit on the expense. You may opt to have 10 physical servers and create 10 each virtual machines on them, but again as long as there is a very large business benefit, doing so would not be ideal. Using a IaaS like the Amazon EC2, it is extremely easy and cost effective to hire as many server instances as possible. The same can be released if not required and thereby saving money on resources not utilised. Another similar likely scenario – To perform a physical load-test of an application with 10,000+ users on the portal and would like to gradually increase the load to know the breaking points of the system.

As you may recollect, there are many obvious advantages of using IaaS – no upfront investment, Pay per use, Ready to go server instances, on demand scalable model and many more.

4) High processor intensive application

Assume a requirement of an application that requires High end computing power to likes of 8 CORE processors with 32 GB RAM to run the CPU intensive calculations and it is estimated to have 20+ such servers to accommodate the desired throughput.

The same can be easily accommodated using IaaS as well as PaaS and all the benefits of going the cloud route like the no upfront investment and pay on demand model help us achieve the ultimate goal rather than going for a large upfront capital investment. Cloud is very useful in scenarios where time to market is one of the key requirement. Recently Microsoft showcased Pixar’s application called “Renderman” uses cloud to get the best benefit. Similar application requirements which need extremely high processing power can go cloud way either through IaaS or PaaS.

5) Provide a centralised high volume (yet highly secure) Data access

Application Storage Needs for applications to the likes of On-Demand Training Platform of a company are increasing significantly day by day.  The storage requirements are already in Several Terabytes (TB) (1 TB = 1024 GB) and growing at the rate of 100 GB/month. There is a need to have scalable storage solution at the same time stay close to the cost. A PaaS would be ideal in this case as it will save on a very high upfront investment on servers and maintainability, provide a very high scalability and also a guaranteed reliability,

6) Hybrid Applications

If there is a need to provide an application which has a on-premise version of the software as well as a web version of the same and both need to share the same data source, then hosting the database for such hybrid applications on the cloud is an ideal option. Both types of front-ends can be in sync and there is a huge save on the money spent on the infrastructure to accommodate connectivity from anywhere.

7) Central Data Repository

Similar to the previous type of application, if there is an application (on-premise or web) deployed and used by thousands of users from across the globe (may be from many different branches of a very large multi-national company), then having the database at a central repository makes sense. Although the same functionality can be achieved by hosting the database server on a secured local intranet and making it available for all the branches to connect, this requires a complex infrastructure setup and a huge investment which may or may not be the best option. Instead, having the database deployed on the cloud using either IaaS or PaaS may be a viable option.

8) Temporary requirement of Datacentre space

Most datacentres do not have a business model by which they provide server space on a need basis or on a temporary basis. Ideally they would want us to provide a minimum 6 month or in many cases a 1 year commitment to use their space so that they have a return on their investment. If your situation demands that you may want to use a datacentre only on a need basis and that too for a period of 1-2 months at a stretch or it is unpredictable, going the IaaS is the best option. IaaS providers like Amazon provides a flexible and cost effective mechanism to configure, host and release the server resources on a need basis.

9) Experimental Applications

If you have an idea to build a SaaS application (or would like to test the waters of building a SaaS version of your existing on-premise software, you may not want to put a high upfront investment if you are not sure of it’s success or failure. Using PaaS to develop your SaaS application idea or prototype provides a very high level of flexibility and safety to ensure you have a strong Business case to go back to your management to build a full blown SaaS application.

10) Freeware

If you are into building Freeware, you may want to keep your cost as low as possible, since the most likely scenario for building your brand would be only after there are too many (happy) users of your product. Keeping the cost low till the time would be key to success for your business. Building your application and / or hosting the same at a PaaS provider or an IaaS provider gives you a minimum till you sense the light of success.

 

The idea of this blog is to give people some food for thought about whether to build an application the conventional way or to build it for / on the cloud and there are too many reasons to go for it or even to go against it for each of the above types of application. But in most scenarios mentioned above, going the cloud way is surely a potential option.

Go cloud – An ISV perspective…Part 2 – PaaS

 

This blog is in continuation to my previous blog entry “Go cloud – An ISV perspective…Part 1 – SaaS” which discussed, if ISV needs to go cloud and offer their products as SaaS, the quicker ways to do so.

Just to keep this article independent, I have copied and pasted below the section which sets the context, to make it easier to read. If you have read my previous blog entry, you may directly jump in to the next section “PAAS”.

Typically as the name suggests, an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) could be one of the following:

A) Traditional Software Product companies: Companies who build and sell software products

B) Web based Software companies offering their products as “Services” typically known as SaaS companies

C) Software intensive companies offering services to a market using a software. The main business of such companies is not to sell Software or even SaaS but to “use” them as their tool to sell their services. A typical example of such a company would be one providing “subscription based” clinical information, or a subscription based access to a vast patent database and so on. In such cases, they do not sell software or service instead they sell “information” using a software.

D) A start-up company who intends to become one of the above three.

For the purpose of the article and for ease of reference, let us refer the above as – A-type ISV, B-Type ISV , C-Type ISV or D-Type ISV respectively.

This article is an attempt to provide a clarity to these ISVs as to which of the cloud services they need / should / may need to consider to embark on for the success of their business.

As briefly explained in one of my previous articles, there are three different aspects to cloud computing i.e.– SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure As a Service) & PaaS (Platform as a Service). If you are a B-Type ISV,  then I am sure you do not need any more explanation of what SaaS is. Also if you are C-Type ISV then too, you may not be too interested in SaaS as selling software isn’t the main business you are in to. But may be you wish to know more on these other aspects such as PaaS & IaaS.

So this is an attempt from me to put few points across to provide a clarity to all the ISVs out there.

 

PaaS

Using PaaS to build an offering or a SaaS product may be the fastest and the most cost effective way of doing so if you are a Type-D ISV (A start up company). As a start up you may have a fantastic product idea in mind which you think of offering it to prospective customers as a SaaS rather than an on-premise software, but you may not want to take a huge risk of doing the whole thing yourself.

By choosing a PaaS, effectively one gets a rapid application development platform to build the software along with an ease of deploying the software on the datacentres of the the PaaS providers. Because the ISVs do not have to own anything, there is no upfront investment. It is a Pay-as-you-use model and the charges of the PaaS providers can be accounted as an OpEx. This model is very useful if you are not sure how many customers you may procure during your initial years. Also, because most of the PaaS providers provide the flexibility of allowing you to increase the servers on demand, it is extremely simple to manage the spikes of customer growth.

It is very important for any ISV to ensure that their products offer a high quality of service and hence managing the non-functional Requirements is the key. And since the system is hosted on a PaaS, most of these non-functional requirements are already taken care by the PaaS providers. The ISV just need to align their Service Level Agreements they provide to their customers to the Service Level Agreement offered by the PaaS providers.

All good so far, but is PaaS a long term solution from the ISV’s perspective? May be and May be not.

If you already are a Type B ISV, i.e. you offer your product as SaaS, and if you are successful at it, there is no specific need to move your application to a PaaS. In some cases it may make sense but in most cases it would not. The only advantage of moving an existing SaaS application would be to reduce the infrastructure maintenance effort. Moreover if you already have a huge customer base, moving your system to PaaS would mean more charges / OpEx you may end up paying to the PaaS provider for each of your thousand users. Hence the cost benefit analysis needs to be done between moving the offering to a PaaS provider vs. Continuing to host (or using a Data centre) privately.

For Type A ISVs, it could be a good option to try their business model by creating a SaaS version of their product on a PaaS and sense the market reaction. As mentioned in my previous article, one option for the Type A ISV would be to reuse as much existing on-premise code as possible and build a SaaS version of it using methods mentioned in the article.

The more safer option would be to try a separate version of their product to be offered as SaaS, using a PaaS. This would mean they could treat this part of the Business as a start up and all the advantages that a Type-D ISV enjoys using a PaaS, can be exploited. And most of the PaaS providers provide a huge amount of flexibility to reuse existing code and make minor changes to make it available to be hosted for PaaS.

Type-C ISVs don’t need to worry about the PaaS immediately if they are happy with their current business model. The only reason they may or may not switch to use a PaaS would be cost as their customers are not users of their “software”. Their customers are users of the “information” provided by the software. As long as they are able to comply to the Quality of Service and their SLA agreements with their customer, the need to move to a PaaS would only be a Cost benefit in a long term and also their TCO for the business.

For an ISV (as our current focus is only ISV) whether to go PaaS or otherwise, is not an easy choice to make, for the sole reason that going PaaS means paying for each user using the system hosted on PaaS. SaaS is all about acquiring more users using the system which means more payment to PaaS providers. Hence it is extremely important to do a cost benefit analysis to evaluate if the CapEx investment + the OpEx maintenance cost for Self- hosted (privately hosted at a Datacentre), equates a lower TCO as compared to a TCO in case of having a permanent OpEx as charges to the PaaS providers.