PaaS Report from IT Central Station 24 - cdn.ttgtmedia.comcdn.ttgtmedia.com/downloads/PaaS+Report+from+IT+Central+Station+24.pdf · © 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited

© 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited To read more real user reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas

PaaS

A PEEK INTO WHAT REAL USERS REALLY THINK

2014

IT Central Station helps enterprise tech professionals by providing

A comprehensive list of all enterprise level PaaS

solutions.

Several real user reviews from enterprise tech

professionals and vendor information.

Specific information to help enterprise tech professionals

select the product that is right for their specific needs.

DISCLAIMER

IT Central Station Ltd. does not endorse or recommend any products or services. The views and opinions of reviewers quoted in this document, IT Central Station websites, and IT Central Station materials (i.e. Content) do not reflect the opinions of IT Central Station. We make no guarantees

about the accuracy, currency, suitability, or quality of the content, and we assume no responsibility for unintended, objectionable, inaccurate, misleading, or unlawful content made available by Content

authors or other third parties


ABOUT IT CENTRAL STATION

User reviews, candid discussions, and more for enterprise technology professionals. The Internet has completely changed the way we make buying decisions. We now use ratings and review sites to see what other real users think before we buy electronics, book a hotel, visit a doctor or choose a restaurant. But in the world of enterprise technology, most of the information online and in your inbox comes from vendors but what you really want is objective information from other users. We created IT Central Station to provide technology professionals like you with a community platform to share information about enterprise software, applications, hardware and services. We commit to offering user-contributed information that is valuable, objective and relevant. We protect your privacy by providing an environment where you can post anonymously and freely express your views. As a result, the community becomes a valuable resource, ensuring you get access to the right information and connect to the right people, whenever you need it.

Use IT Central Station to: • Read and post reviews

of vendors and products • Request or share

information about functionality, quality, and pricing

• Contact real users with relevant product experience

• Get immediate answers to questions

• Validate vendor claims • Exchange tips for

getting the best deals with vendors

ITCentralStation.com

244 5th Avenue,

Suite R-230 New York, NY 10001

USA +1 (646) 328-1944

[email protected]

ABOUT THIS REPORT

This report is comprised of a comprehensive list of all enterprise level PaaS solutions. We have also included several real user reviews posted on ITCentralStation.com. The reviewers of these products have been validated as real users based on their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that they provide reliable opinions and not those of product vendors.


IMPORTANT NOTICE

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.


VENDOR & PRODUCT LIST

V E N D O R P R O D U C T

Heroku Heroku

Rackspace Rackspace Cloud

Salesforce.com Salesforce Platform

Amazon Amazon EC2

Google App Engine

Microsoft Azure

Engine Yard Cloud Engine Yard Cloud

Pramati Technologies WaveMaker

IBM SmartCloud Application Services

CloudBees CloudBees

eApps eApps

Mendix Mendix

TIBCO Silver

AT&T AT&T Platform as a Service

BitRefinery BitRefinery

Caspio Bridge

Claris Networks Claris Cloud

CloudSigma CloudSigma

Cordys Cordys PaaS

IIJ GIO IIJ GIO PaaS Cloud

Internap Network Services Internap Cloud


Jelastic Jelastic

Software AG LongJump PaaS Cloud

Oracle Oracle Cloud Platform

OrangeScape OrangeScape PaaS Cloud

Teklinks Teklinks

Tier 3 Tier 3

WorkXpress WorkXpress


Amazon EC2 Vendor: Amazon www.aws.amazon.com

REVIEW BY A REAL USER

srmgrdatactr355 Verified by IT Central Station Senior Manager of Data Center, Integrator company with 1-500 Employees

PROS

Few things I admire about this whole AWS service by Amazon are:

• Provides persistent block storage volumes

• Excellent load balancing features for servers

• Excellent support on all types of relational databases, for example Oracle etc.

• Awesome repository of operating systems from Ubuntu, Slackware, Microsoft Servers etc.

• The virtual private cloud feature is an amazing add on for the service

CONS

Few cons of the AWS platform are:

• Lack of .NET support

• A bit costlier than Microsoft Azure based on computer per hour and outbound bandwidth.

• Unavailability of middleware caching, integration and identity management.

OTHER

One of the first and extremely professional services launched for the cloud platform is the advent of Amazon AWS. The bundle of services provided by them such as CloudFront, CloudWatch, EC2, Simple Storage service etc undoubtedly cover all the aspects needed by the developers and system administrators to match infrastructure and scalability issues for the growing demands.

WHAT REAL USERS ARE SAYING…

“Great platform but needs a lot of attention.”

“Great way to enter into the cloud. Disk performance is generally the issue.”

“A bit pricey cloud service, but with good features, and worth the money.”



Techie Verified by IT Central Station Developer, Software R&D company with 5000+ Employees

PROS

• Amazon Web Services offer a very low pricing option based on usage, with no up-front payment.

• Amazon Web Services can be used as a Content delivery network, as Amazon has multiple data hosting centers spread across the globe.

• Amazon Web Services is a highly secure durable technology platform, for hosting all your applications over the cloud. The AWS storage facility is very scalable and grows and shrinks as per your needs. You only pay for the exact usage and not more.

• AWS is a not dependent on any programming language or any kind of operating system platform. You are free to choose the development platform or programming model that is suitable for your application and business. You can also decide what services you want to use and how to use them. This takes the burden of focusing on infrastructure off your shoulders.

• There’s less IT infrastructure staff to manage. Scheduled scan of the network automatically discovers network devices and monitors the IP of the device, the name, machine type and polling method.

CONS

• Though not very often, Amazon services are known to go down once in a while. If you are running highly intensive businesses off Amazon, you might end up losing a big chunk of your revenue due to AWS break downs. You might have to think of alternative backup options as well.

• The other thing to keep in mind is the cost factor. Though the prices are not sky high, if you are a startup then you have to answer the big question: Is cloud comparatively a cheaper option or is it more expensive?

• Initial learning curve, sometimes takes a bit of time and deters quite a lot of people from doing their business with AWS, so make sure you spend sometime to ramp up with AWS.


SUMMARY

A good cloud service that takes care of all the back end infrastructure management and administration work off your hands. The pay-as-you-go option is very suitable for most of the organizations. Prices are a bit higher when compared to hosting your service over your own hardware. However, you get the benefits of having your application over a cloud. The auto-scale feature is something worth the money, as you don't have to worry about deploying more servers when there is a high demand during peak times.


Azure Vendor: Microsoft www.microsoft.com


headeng398 Verified by IT Central Station Head of Infrastructure, Tech Services Company with 500-5000 Employees

PROS

• Windows Azure supports ASP.NET and Node.js, among other platforms.

• Due to the Node.js supported library, Azure is capable of supporting the Map Reduce Infrastructure, Hadoop, for distributed data processing and number processing.

• With the help of AppFabric Internet services, it can support Java, Ruby, etc.

• Since the underlying Azure OS runs on Windows Server 2008 edition, it supports running all Microsoft Enterprise Applications, hosting services like IIS and many more.

• Using Windows Azure Connect, various Virtual Machines can be easily connected with each other

• Has support for multiple users & roles for management purposes.

CONS

• It is a well known fact that Microsoft has yet to upgrade its IaaS technologies for providing a near zero interruption triggered by Load balancers.

• Physical security of data is a major concern for various IaaS service providers, and Azure is no different.

• Though having data served from multiple data centers improves performance, it has increased the risk of data security.

• Compared to other IaaS service providers out there in the market, Azure is a bit expensive.

SUMMARY

It's true that to run various Microsoft Enterprise Solutions, Azure is the best option, keeping aside minor caveats. Unless your requirement makes it mandatory to use IIS, you should consider other


“Microsoft Azure is best cloud computing platform available in the market.”

“Microsoft's cloud computing platform Windows Azure is a combination of both PaaS and IaaS.”

“Good for running Microsoft Enterprise Applications, although a pricey alternative to other IaaS/Paas service providers in the market.”

“We moved our accounting database from an in-house SQL Server to MS Azure cloud and saw a significant increase in performance.”


IaaS service providers available in the market, which are comparatively cheaper as well. It has good support for various platforms like Java, Ruby, and PHP for websites. Windows Azure provides API's built on popular and robust technology like HTML, REST, and XML.


teenajain Verified by IT Central Station Director of IT, Tech Company with 1-500 Employees

PROS

• Windows Azure is available in multiple data centers around the world, enabling you to deploy your applications close to your customers.

• It enables you to use any language, framework, or tool to build applications. Features and services are exposed using open REST protocols.

• Windows Azure’s distributed caching and CDN services, allow you to reduce latency and deliver great application performance anywhere in the world.

• Giving power back to the users to concentrate on the application and take away all their worries from the hosting and provisioning point of view.

CONS

• Systems mirroring is currently not available within Azure, unlike Amazon Web Services.

• Lose account control to MS.

• MS has calibrations to compute how much you used them, and how you plan to validate it.

SUMMARY

The Windows Azure platform, which provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios, includes a cloud service operating system and a set of developer services. With Windows Azure there are at least two instances of each role that the application needs and therefore, the Fabric controller load balances users’ requests between them. What this means is that there is no guarantee two requests from the same user will go to the same instance. This may be a problem with some applications that need a stateful connection with the user. A stateful connection is one in which


some information about a connection between two systems is retained for future use.


App Engine Vendor: Google www.google.com


Dan Mullineux Verified by IT Central Station CTO, Media Company with 1-500 Employees

OVERVIEW

Google App Engine is amazing, we got our prototype up and running in no time, and for no expense. We then decided it was the right platform to run a big part of our platform. We particularly appreciated the following features:

PROS

• No sys admin needed.

• Automatic scaling.

• Amazing uptime (despite earlier reports)

• Impeccable security credentials

• Deploy scripts out of the box.

• Clean well-documented API.

• Extremely flexible data model.

• Great web UI management console.

• Nice task queue (though this is perhaps to mitigate some of the limitations.

• Carbon neutral

As we have grown, so too has the impact of the limitations of app engine. Like many others we were surprised at the new pricing, but the analysis showed it would not be much more than a homegrown solution, and we could still keep all the benefits. Here are some of the problems we have faced:

CONS

• Domain and SSL.

• Price.

• Map Reduce costs More.

• Extracting data costs More and is SLOOOOWWW.


“Overall a good and cheap platform with scalability support. Good for individuals and startups, but not suitable for heavy/large applications.”

“One of the first PaaS solutions around and still one of the best.”

“A good application hosting option for short term, low budget startups.”


• Front End Instance Hours, Latency and Concurrency.

• General Performance and Design Compromise.

SUMMARY

If you have a relatively simple app, small to medium sized app, with a reasonably static data model (deleting lots of records is also expensive) and say – less than 10 million records that do not require regular data processing and analysis then Google App Engine remains an incredible choice.

If your data is starting to scale and you really want to extract full value from your data by running analysis jobs and you need access to large-ish record sets during each request (like our case of synching full record sets to mobile devices) then Google App Engine is the wrong hammer for your nut.


DevMgr327 Verified by IT Central Station Manager of Development, Software R&D Company with 1-500 Employees

PROS

• Zero maintenance cost for web servers

• Reliable for scalability

• Free basic account with limited quota for trial

• Suitable for startups with limited users and limited resources

CONS

• No filesystem access

• More expensive than the alternate options if a product/service has a lot of users

• Language support limited to Java and Python

• Database options limited to MySQL and Google data store


Join the IT Central Station Community

This report features just a few of the PaaS reviews on IT Central Station. If you would like to read more about what real users are saying about the many PaaS solutions on the market, visit the PaaS page at IT Central Station:

http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas

There are a number of ways you can participate in the IT Central Station community! Write a review, read a comment, or just follow a product. Either way, we’ll be sure to let you know when people are talking about the solutions you care about!

Give to Get

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.

Documents

PaaS Report from IT Central Station 24 - cdn.ttgtmedia.comcdn.ttgtmedia.com/downloads/PaaS+Report+from+IT+Central+Station+24.pdf · © 2014 ITCentralStation.com Reproduction Prohibited