Cloud services platforms are still in their infancy considering the size of the market, but big players like Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, and Google have made significant investments for the future in offering cloud services in some form or the other. In this section, I will outline the offerings of some cloud services providers:
Amazon Web Services
Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, and to support its daily operations, Amazon has one of the most advanced data centers in the world. Processing millions of transactions every hour requires a high-class transactional infrastructure that will not only provide reliability and speed but also reduce the total cost of a transaction. Amazon has achieved this by building a resilient data center infrastructure boasting automated virtualized operating systems and storage servers. Amazon has decided to further monetize its intellectual property by renting this platform and storage services to developers and ISVs for developing and hosting applications. Amazon’s cloud services offerings consist of five services:
• Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2)
• SimpleDB
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• CloudFront
• Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Elastic MapReduce
Google Apps
Google Apps is a collection of messaging and collaboration software services for businesses and schools. The main services offered in Google Apps are mail (Gmail), instant messaging (Google Talk), calendar (Google Calendar), document management (Google Docs), and site management (Google Sites). Google Apps guarantees 99.9 percent availability for the Premier edition of its service offering.
Google also provides REST-style APIs called Google Data APIs for programming not only for Google Apps but also for other web services offered by Google like Google Maps, Google Health, and YouTube.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is an environment for developing and deploying web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The App Engine supports Python and Java as the primary programming languages to develop web applications. Developers can develop web applications in Python or Java and deploy those applications in App Engine for automatic scaling and load balancing. App Engine also provides a datastore that supports simple create, retrieve, and delete functions. Developers can access the datastore from within App Engine web applications to store and query data. Google App Engine also provides Google Data APIs for accessing Google Apps components like Mail, Calendar, Search, and Docs.
SalesForce.com and Force.com
SalesForce.com is popular as the cloud CRM application and has established a very good user base in small-to-medium businesses. The success of SalesForce.com can be partially attributed to its multitenant architecture that is completely metadata driven and flexible for users to customize. Users can not only customize the user interface but also tailor the CRM business objects their business.
SalesForce.com extended the multitenant and metadata-driven architecture to a much more open platform called Force.com, which SalesForce.com refers to as a platform as a service (PaaS) offering. Force.com is a platform for building business applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM).
GoGrid
The GoGrid cloud service offers Windows and Linux virtual machine images preconfigured with the most frequently used software components. It also offers cloud storage and free hardware load-balancing between virtual machine instances using Big IP’s F5 load balancer. The service is very similar to the Amazon EC2 service offering with some feature differences.
3Tera
3Tera’s AppLogic platform is a grid operating system for deploying web applications. AppLogic provides a client interface, shown in Figure 1-27, for virtually designing your cloud application by dragging and dropping virtualized web, application, and database servers on the design surface and connecting them.
Microsoft
In 2008 during the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced its official entry into the cloud services arena with the Windows Azure platform (previously known as Azure Services Platform). Even though, the Microsoft Online services called Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) have been around for a few years, the Windows Azure platform is an attempt to create an end-to-end cloud service offering in the platform, middleware, enterprise services, and consumer services categories.
Windows Azure is a collection of building blocks for cloud services. Microsoft has been in the cloud business for quite some time with its consumer cloud services like MSN, Xbox Live, and Hotmail.
Microsoft has also announced a suite of cloud-based business productivity and collaboration applications called Microsoft Online services that include applications like SharePoint Online, Exchange Hosted Services, and Conferencing Services.
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