What do you need to do? The assignment requires you to do the following: Identify four cloud service providers who offer PaaS (Platform as a Service) to develop applications. Select one of the cloud...

PaaS Cloud Service Providers
PaaS Cloud Service Providers
PaaS Cloud Service Providers
Comparison with Bluemix
4/6/2018
Table of Contents
Introduction    2
Cloud PaaS Service Providers    2
Windows Azure    2
Amazon AWS    3
Red Hat OpenShift    4
Google App Engine    5
Reasons for Selecting Amazon AWS for Comparison    6
Bluemix v/s Amazon AWS    6
Conclusion    9
References    11
Introduction
Cloud computing is defined as the practice of using inter-connected networks of servers that are hosted on the internet for the purpose of data management, storage, handling, and many others. There are various cloud delivery and deployment models that have been developed. Three of the primary cloud delivery models include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These three models provide different features and abilities to develop applications on the cloud or perform other services.
There are numerous vendors in the market that provide services on any or all of the three cloud delivery models. The report covers the description of four cloud PaaS service providers. One of these providers and its services is then compared with Bluemix.
Cloud PaaS Service Providers
Windows Azure
Windows Azure clod PaaS services allow quick deployment and management of powerful applications. It allows the users to simply upload their application and the deployment details, such as load balancing, provisioning, availability, and monitoring is handled by Azure. The provider has an excellent customer base and there have been no issues of patching, network mismanagement, or patching that have been reported or detected earlier. The applications remain always available even at the time of updates, maintenance, and hardware issues. There is a robust platform provided by Azure to provide the developers with the ability to develop codes and carry out testing activities, manage complexities involved with much ease.
There are web and mobile applications that are high on demand by the consumers. Windows Azure cloud PaaS services provides instant access to infinite scale so that the developers may also obtain the already developed codes and customize them as per the requirement. The application environment provided by the cloud provider is effective, distributed, and modern. The customer satisfaction level on the applications developed using Azure platform is also good due to continuous availability and high performance. The Software Development Kits (SDKs) available with Azure support a lot many languages, such as Python, Ruby, .NET, Java, and many others (Sysfore, 2018).
The pricing of the services depends upon the instances that are involved in running a particular application. There are five standard instances that are defined as extra-small, small, medium, large and extra-large. Shared virtual core priced at an hourly rate of $0.02 with 768MB RAM is supported by small instance. There are two virtual cores at an hourly rate of $0.16 per hours with 3.5 GM RAM supported by the medium counterpart. 14 GB RAM, 8 virtual cores and an hourly rate of $0.64 is associated with the extra-large instance. In case of the extremely large applications that cannot work on standard servers, the cloud provider also offers A6 and A7 servers that have 28GB and 56GB RAM respectively (Sullivan, 2013).
Amazon AWS
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided by Amazon are one of the most demanded cloud services in the market. Amazon started with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud models and has stepped in the area of platform services since past few years. AWS analysed the customer requirements and demands and came up with PaaS services to fulfil the use cases and various development scenarios as desired by the customers. Some of the popular services include Amazon RDS, Amazon EC2, Amazon EFS, and many others. The cloud service provider offers a wide range of service that may fulfil the needs of small to medium scale customers. Application development, along with data storage, backup, hosted desktops, file sharing etc. are some of the services provided by AWS. Recently, AWS has also launched the cloud services for application life cycle management with new set of services, such as CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeCommit, and others.
One of the recent cloud PaaS service released by Amazon is Amazon API Gateway. The service includes an application programming interface management layer and is one the latest inclusions in the set of service portfolios by AWS. The cloud provider has termed this service as a front door to the applications as it allows ease data access, business logic and integration with the back-end services as well. It is another example of a classic customer workload that took the shape of managed service.
There is wide range of features provided and supported by Amazon API Gateway and one of the most significant out of all is the integration with AWS Lambda. The service allows the developers to upload the code snippets on Lambda and provides them the capability to expose the same using REST services which are hosted by API Gateway. It leads to the formation of front door to all the micro-services platforms. There are also many other interesting features that are included in API Gateway, such as point and click ability to the developers that allow them to configure a particular API key along with addition of custom domain, caching, and bursting features. There are also options to generate native SDKs for operating systems, such as Android or iOS. The integration of Lambda and API Gateway led to the formation of an advanced micro-service platform without any issues associated with scheduling, monitoring, or security. These services are also elastic in nature that...