Saturday, September 30, 2017

Cloud service vs Software as a service

Everyday we use some awesome cloud services or applications like Gmail, Whatsapp, Waze etc.

If I write a web application and put it on a server that I rent from a hosting service at $3.99 a month, is it a cloud service or is it "software as a service" ?. Or is it just a plain vanilla web application ?

Even if I am write a modern application, and it is hosted on AWS or google cloud, does that automatically make it a "cloud" application ?

Today, no software company says, we are "software as a service". Everyone says they have a cloud service.

In this blog, I describe the characteristics that makes an application a real "cloud" application.

An example of a real cloud application is Gmail. As long as I have a connection to the internet, I am always able to access my mail. I can access it from any browser, any mail client, any phone, any device. I can access my email from any place in the world. A billion other people trying to access their emails at the same time does not affect me. I can still do my email stuff. If I try to get an email that I got 10 years ago, even though I am communicating with some server on the west coast, that may not have that data, gmail will get the data from a server that has stored that email. If that server is down, gmail will get it from another server in the same data center that has a replica of the data. If the entire data center is down, gmail will get it from another data center in the same region. If the entire region is down, gmail might get my email from a server in a data center in completely different region say Europe.

The characteristics of a real cloud service are :

(1)  Location independence

A user of a cloud service must be able to use the service from any location  without any degradation in service.

If the service has just one server in mountain view, then when I travel to China, accessing it is going to be horribly slow.

The location independence comes from geographically distributing servers and replicating data to where it is served.

(2) Scale horizontally


As the service becomes popular and the number of users go up, the number of requests go up, the data size goes up, there should be no degradation in service. It should scale by adding more servers.
Load balancers will distribute requests to a clusters of servers.

(3) Highly available


Service should be available 24*7. You have data replication and redundancy built in. A failure of a server and even a data center should not lead to stoppage of service

(4) Device independence


You should be able to access the service from any device that can access the internet - browser, mobile device, IOT etc.

(5) Self healing


The service infrastructure should monitor itself , detect failures early , so that down times are minimal

(6) Commodity hardware and (open source software)


Given the scale of a real cloud service, even for the large companies, it is affordable only using commodity hardware and software.

(7) Micro services

The software is generally built as micro services that communicate using simple protocols like REST. Monolithic applications are harder to maintain and fix.

Gmail, amazon shopping website, Waze, Whatspp etc are examples of real cloud applications. Under the hood they are powered by real cloud scale infrastructures.

The good news for the rest of us building cloud applications is that we do not have to build every thing from scratch. There are 2 broad options


Option 1 : Rent physical cloud but build software and data infrastructure

First there is the physical cloud : You needs machines either physical or virtual on the internet, distributed and across many regions. This part can be rented from Cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others. You will not want to build a physical cloud unless you are close to being another Google or Amazon.

Then there is the data and software part. These are the micro service you build, the distributed databases and message brokers you use. You do the management of data , the replication, the software scaling. There are many open source frameworks , databases , caches, message brokers to help.

A good approach is to build and test the software locally with characteristics listed above and then deploy to the physical cloud for production.

The advantage of this approach is the your service will work on a physical cloud from any vendor. It works even if you decide to run it off the internet or "in premise"/intranet.

Option 2: Rent platform as a service

If you prefer not to deal with infrastructure, cloud vendors have combined the physical cloud and software into "platform as a service". Google App engine or AWS lamda , RDS are examples of this.
Here the cloud vendor manages both the physical cloud and software infrastructure and you will  write just the application code. The downside of this approach is vendor lock in. This is appropriate if you do not have the relevant expertise for option 1.

Summary


In summary a "real" cloud application is one that scales horizontally and is highly available with the same quality of service  irrespective of where the user is, what device he uses or how many users are using the service at a time. Simply writing a monolithic application and putting it on amazon ec2 or google compute is not a cloud service.

However if you design and build your application with the characteristics listed above, your application is "cloud" ready. You can deploy it to a physical cloud anytime.




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