#CloudArchitecture: 7 Factors on how to choose a Public Cloud Platform Provider
This is a and will be a common question faced by organizations, architects and designers wishing to choose their candidate cloud platform from number of cloud providers and this is obviously confusing topic for the first timers, new cloud architects due to almost similar capabilities, services and offerings(as per marketing material), This small post lists common factors which can help you choose a public cloud platform provider mainly consisting of Azure, AWS and GCP. Please note that following is not a defined order or we are not prescribing any order below. We should look at the list just as factors and depending on ‘prioritised requirements’ make our own ordereded list for a particular project or program.
1. Data Residency requirements/Regulatory requirements
Ideally this should be your first criteria as regulations and legislation may require you or your organization to keep data within your country’s border. In such cases you should choose a provider offering services in the particular region. For this reasons public cloud providers offers some specific regions/availability zones and data centers in a particular country/continent. Some examples are: Azure China, Azure Germany and US Gov regions.
Some of the industry and government regulations are fairly explicit and demanding in terms on where to keep the data, retention duration, processing requirement, liabilities of the processors, etc. These requirement may also govern patterns of the data, storage formats, masking, encryption of data, they will also lay down guidelines on whom to notify in case of a data breach and associated penalties. Example of such regulations are GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS.
2. Your organization or your clients location on map
Cloud services needs setting up big data centers which take long to come up, need lot of careful planning and lot of capital investments. Due to this its possible that you may not be able to find lot of options from all major players and you may just have one or two providers. In such a case due to close proximity, bandwidth and network latency choice you may want to go ahead with what is available in closest proximity. You can refer to this URL(may be outdated) and see geographies in Latin America and Africa has only couple of options.
2.1 Desired Services on the target cloud platform
Few public cloud providers offer some special services which may be unique to their platforms in a particular region and an equivalent service may not be available on competitor platforms, in such case you may want to go ahead with those specific cloud provider. An example for this is AWS Satellite Ground Station services, at the time of this writing Microsoft intends to offer similar service which might come up sometime in future.
AWS Ground Station (amazon.com)
3. Cost of the services and incentives available
Commercials and cost of services are often a important factor to choose a platform. Each cloud service platform offers their services at different prices depending on hardware capabilities including processors, memory, networking, etc. While selecting platform you may want to compare services costs based on rich calculators available on these platforms.
- Here are cost calculators for AWS, Azure and GCP and you can consume them by comparative workloads and comparing costs.
Cloud platform providers can also provide special rates on their services based on volume adoption and duration of commitment to the services. These are usually available to enterprise customers
Cloud providers do offer special prices to large corporations if they are ready to give long term commitments to book block compute/infrastructure on their platforms. This is commonly referred as spot process and it can be up to 30% cheaper than normal prices often referred as Pay as You Go pricing.
4. Bandwidth requirements
Some of the leading cloud providers offer number of options with very high bandwidth enabled connectivity channels to their cloud data centers which may help you connect to hosted services almost with negligible dependency.
5. Service levels guarantees
Major players offer very high level availability guarantees on their services which may be a compelling reason for you to go ahead with particular provider. One example is SLA’ s on Azure Storage and AWS S3 storage services.
6. Redundancy available in the target regions
Redundancy plays a major role if you are running a mission critical workloads. It becomes key asks in number of business like Financial services, Banking and Payments. Redundancy can let you spin up lot of compute within seconds. Cloud service providers are able to make redundancy available by investing in continuously adding new data centers in regions where they see higher demands year over year. One key example is that US Central, US East and US West are key regions for all three major cloud platform providers like Azure, AWS and GCP. In these regions you will certainly able to provision almost all generally available services at scale, with most flexibility and at considerable price point.
7. Resource and Skills Availability
This is often very important factor while selecting product/s, platform/s and services and it is often a important parameter for selecting cloud platforms as well. Availability of people with rich experience in cloud application, services development can make all the difference your organization may need. Hiring experienced people from outside or having them available within the enterprise is much more rational then retraining, hiring beginners in the topic. Sometimes its a make or break case for new product, service launches and introduction.
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