Cloud Provider

This is the third of a series of blog posts around Cloud Computing. It gives an overview about the current Cloud Computing trends and explains how to set up a private cloud environment with Microsoft's System Center products.

In this post the different cloud solutions currently available are compared. "Cloud" solutions which are not related to infrastructure are not considered in this overview. Meaning every Software-as-a-Service or central data storage solutions like Skydrive or iCloud are out of scope.
Following you find an overview about the main infrastructure and platform cloud solutions:

	VMWare Cloud Foundry	Microsoft Cloud	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) / Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk	IBM SmartCloud	Google AppScale
Description	Open-Source solution from VMWare written in Ruby	Public Cloud: Windows Azure, Private Cloud: System Center Suite	Amazon's cloud hosting solution	SaaS/PaaS/IaaS solution from IBM	Google's framework for developing highly scalable applications
Cloud Type	Private Cloud	Public and Private Cloud	Public Cloud	Public Cloud	Public Cloud
Service Model	PaaS	IaaS, PaaS	IaaS, PaaS	IaaS, PaaS	IaaS, PaaS
Virtualization	VMWare ESX	Windows Server Hyper-V, VMWare ESX, Citrix Xen	Citrix Xen	IBM	Xen, KVM, Eucalyptus
Supported Technologies	ASP .NET, Java, Spring, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, Grails, Groovy, Scala, PHP, Python/Django	ASP .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js	Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP .NET	Java, PHP	Java, Python, Ruby
Supported Application Servers	Java Application Server	IIS, Apache Tomcat	IIS, IBM WebSphere, Java Application Server, Oracle WebLogic Server, Apache	IBM WebSphere	(custom)
Supported Databases	Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB	Microsoft SQL Server	Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle	Based on DB2 and compatible with Oracle	HBase, Hypertable, Apache Cassandra, MySQL Cluster, Redis
Operation Systems	Linux, Windows, custom	Windows, Linux, custom VHD	Windows, Linux	Linux	Linux
Price Model	Not published yet (Beta)	Pay-per-use	Pay-per-use	Price Table	Quota-based Pricing

Public Cloud Solutions
Currently, the main players in Public Clouds are Microsoft and Amazon. Amazon comes from an IaaS approach and Microsoft started with PaaS. These are also the areas in which each provider leads the market.
Amazon has in general more experience with Cloud Computing. Their public cloud offers great flexibility and full control over the infrastructure. On the other hand the patch management has to be done by the client. Amazon introduced AWS Elastic Beanstalk which provides a standardized automated deployment approach and the possibility to scale out applications and services easily. But the cloud consumer is still responsible for the underlying virtual machine and the update management.
Microsoft provides an extremely flexible PaaS solution which can be completely customized by invoking custom scripts. As long as installations and configurations are completely scripted and running on the windows environment, there are no limitations with this approach. Microsoft even takes over that patch management for the underlying operating system.

Private Cloud Solutions
In the Private Cloud sector there are at the moment just two alternatives: Microsoft's System Center solution and VMWare's Cloud Foundry. Microsoft is the only vendor which actually supports both, the private cloud and public cloud scenarios as well as a way to shift applications and services smoothly between private and public cloud data centers.
In the following posts I am going to explain in detail what Microsoft’s System Center Suite can offer and how to configure a private cloud environment.