Comparing PaaS Cloud Service Providers: AWS And BlueMix

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 service providers from your list for further investigation. If necessary, create a trial account and use all the different services it offers. Take screenshots to record some of those services while using them.
• Compare and contrast between Bluemix (used in this unit) and the PaaS service of the cloud service provider you have chosen.

Comparison of PaaS Service Providers

Cloud computing has become one of the fastest growing paradigms as a networking model and other computing processes. The assistance that cloud provides is the reason behind its enormous popularity. It is categorised into three categories namely IaaS (Information-as-a-service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) and SaaS (Software-as-a-service) (Rani and Ranjan 2014). They all assist in different computing services. The subject of the devised paper will be the PaaS and the cloud service providers. The proposed work will shortlist four PaaS cloud service provider and further shortlist one of the providers to do a comparative analysis with the IBM BlueMix PaaS. The comparative analysis will be done based on multiple factors one of which will be measuring the ease that both service providers offer in developing “Hello World” application. Based on the evaluation the author will offer his own opinion over the best PaaS service provider before concluding the devised paper.

The following table lists all the cloud services providers who offer PaaS:

Service Provider	Key Feature
IBM BlueMix	Capable of fulfilling hybrid cloud requirement.
Google App Engine	Isolates processes and hence, risk reduction.
Microsoft Azure	Offers more control as it can integrate IaaS and PaaS.
Amazon Web Services	Supports multiple languages, server-side technologies and database.
Engine Yard	Better control over the VMs (Virtual Machines) than others.
Red Hat OpenShift	User interface option with the PaaS using a web-console.
Heroku	Suitable for instant deployment and supports wide spectrum of distributed application.
AppFog	The developed application can be operated on multiple clouds.
Caspio	Easy to use GUI (graphical user interface).
Long Jump	Developer-centric support
Cloud Foundry	Open source PaaS services
CloudBees	Ease of moving Java applications to the cloud.
OracleVoice	The experience it has and has been sustainable.

Table1: LIST OF PAAS SERVICE PROVIDERS

(Source: Created by Author)

The services shortlisted for the recommendation are the Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google AppEngine and Long Jump. The decision of selecting the following is based on the special feature they offer. However, the subject selected to compare with the IBM BlueMix is the AWS. The selection of the AWS is based on the following two reasons:

• Flexible and ease of Use: The deemed service provider offers the users the choice of operating system along with the programming language, database, application platform and others services with great ease of use. The virtual cluster offered by the service provider also enables the users to attempt at new things.
• Scalable and reliable: AWS tools such as the Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling offers the choice of scaling down or up of the application. Additionally, the computing infrastructure offered by the Amazon offers reliability over the security and safekeeping of information. The services offered by the subject are even cost-efficient for the users.  

The table below shows the comparison between the services offered by the AWS and the Bluemix:

Services offered	AWS	BlueMix
IoT (Internet of Things)	AWS IoT SDK (software development kit) along with the necessary features like (communicating over the MQTT, Http or others and supporting multiple languages) also offers scalability.	IBM is offering configured platforms (IoT) for the vehicles and buildings along with the other features.
Artificial intelligence	Amazon does offer AI services however, the basics (Natural language processing, vision analytics, speech processing and others) are very weak and it does not stand in comparison to other service providers.	Unlike, the AWS, BlueMix have a stable offering of the AI services through its Watson developers cloud services. It has matured in offering the AI services as part of the
SDA (Scalable Digital Application)	AWS leads in the deemed service offering. The reason for the same lays on the huge scalability option offered by the service provider along with cost efficiency.	However, BlueMix lacks heavily in this area. The service offered by organisation is costly and scalability option has also been limited to keep the network secure and efficient.
Others	The services offered by the AWS are mostly focused on the corporate world and the services are designed to assist them. Though, the service provider offers basics services to the students that can fit in their budget.	Contradicting, the BlueMix has its focus more on the students, researchers, geographically diversified projects, IT start-ups and others experimental purposes.

Table 2: COMPARISON OF THE PAAS SERVICES

(Source: Created by the Author)

The design and navigation of the system decides the comfortability that the user will get while using the system. Hence, it is important for the service providers to have a sound design and navigation. A system that has design contains certain components to combine and reuse that can build some interface by the user. BlueMix has focused on the same and has designed the system to be user friendly, however the system offers some navigation issues. The issues are multiple login and interface problems and others. The large swatches of UI that are owned for the consistency issue with the design of the individual services.  The design language of Bluemix provides basic framework for their products. On the other hand, AWS offers superior interface that is preferred by the users and the design is also comparatively simple. For managing the application of the architecture life cycle, this tool is the best practice for the use of AWS design pattern. The user will be able to better identify the requirements, implementation plan and services that can be configure which include EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, VPC, S3, CloudFormation, and IAM.

Design and Navigation of Services

The deployment of the “Hello world” application in the AWS as described in the official websites of the service providers has been discussed as follows in the step-by-step pattern. The screenshots of the coding and other vital measures have been attached. The data was, and the screenshots were collected from AWS’s official website (Docs.aws.amazon.com 2018).

Step 1: Launch a Windows Server Amazon EC2 Instance:

In the deemed step the user needs to create a tag key of ‘Name’ and value of ‘CodeDeployDemo’.

Step 2: Configure the Source Content that needs to be deployed:

The deemed step of the deployment process takes account of three sub-steps.

Creating the web page:

1. Allocating the location to the file in system drives.

2. Creating a file within the allocated location.

3. Coding and saving the file

Developing a script to run the application:

1. In the allocated file location, another file is created with the name “before-install.bat”.

2. Adding the batch script code and saving the file

Adding the application specification file:

1. In the deemed step an application specification file will be saved in the allocated folder by the name “appspec.yml’.

2. Adding the YAML code to the saved file.

Step 3: Uploading the "Hello, World!" Application:

Provisioning the Amazon S3 Bucket:

To create the Amazon-S3 bucket (CLI), it is required to call the ‘mb’ command by the name of “codedeploydemobucket”.

To create the console Amazon-S3 bucket, the steps shown in the image should be followed:

Authorising the Amazon-S3 Bucket and the IAM user:

Verification of authentication of the download request by the user:

Verifying the upload authentication:

Preparing the application’s file for the bucket:

Bundling the application files together in a unit archive file and pushing it:

Switching the folders to the allocated location for the “Hello World” application:

Calling the command ‘create-application’ to register the new application by the name of ‘HelloWorld_App’ with the AWS CodeDeploy:

Calling the ‘push’ command for bundling the files together:

Step 4: Deployment of the "Hello, World!" Application:

Deploying the application revision:

Before the deployment, the service role ARN (IAM role that authorises service permission to act on behalf of the user) should be defined followed by the deployment group. After that “create-deployment-group” command should be called to create the deployment group by the name of “HelloWorld_DepGroup” that is associated with the application by the name of “HelloWorld_App”

After completing the discussed steps, the monitoring along with the troubleshooting of the deployment is done. Followed by the deployment step, an update is made to the site and redeployment of the site is done to make the changes visible to the Amazon-EC2 instance.

The following section discusses the steps involved in deploying the “Hello World” application using the IBM BlueMix PaaS cloud services. The screenshots/photos of the coding and the steps have been attached with the instructions that are gathered from the official website of the considered PaaS service provider (Schaefer and Hawk 2018).

Deployment of 'Hello World' Application

Developing a toolchain for the new application:

The deemed step has following sub-steps which needs to be followed to complete the objective of the step.

1. Logging in to the IBM Cloud.
2. Navigation to the “DevOps” dashboard.
3. Click on “Create a toolchain” option.
4. Selection of the “Develop a Cloud Foundry app” toolchain option.

5. Now, the user needs to enter the name of the proposed toolchain (In this case HelloWorld)
6. To integrate the Issue tracking tool and Git Repos, “Repository type” of “New” is selected followed by the name for the new repo.
7. After clicking on the “Create” option the deemed page will appear

   The discussed step takes in consideration of the coding part. The following steps are of assistance in achieving the objective.

1. Click the “Eclipse Orion Web IDE” on the toolchain overview page. Accessing the option will automatically create gifignore and .cfignore.
2. The next step would be to select “File>New>File”.
3. A file will be highlighted to enter the file name where “index.html” will be entered.
4. The code shown below need to be entered in the editor area.

The box shown below will appear after the code is entered in the editor section.

Developing a manifest:

In the deemed step a file named “manifest” is developed that directs the IBM Cloud on the process of deployment of the application. The deployment of the application is possible without the manifest file, however, it is equipped to simplify the deployment process. The process of creating the manifest is listed as follows:

1. “File>New>File” must be selected in the Web IDE section.
2. The above step will highlight a file which need to be named “manifest.yml”.
3. The above step will highlight an editor area, where the code pasted below should be entered.

The above sections showed various steps from creation of the webpage to the development of the manifest page. In the discussed step the deployment and running of the application is done.

1. The first step is to click the “Deploy” button in the Web IDE section. The successful deployment of the app will display And if, the deployment fails, it will show red dot. In the deemed situation modification needs to be made in the unique names in the launch configuration.The modification can be made by modifying the changing the name in the coding which is shown in the screenshot below:

2. After the above discussed step is successful, the application can be opened in the web browser by clicking the “Open the application”.

3. The website will highlight:

The development and the deployment process of the “Hello world” application has been shown in the above section of both the AWS and BlueMix. The process is shown step-by-step to measure the level of difficulty associated with the development and deployment of the application. It is evident from the above section that the developing and deploying the hello world application is much more comfortable in the BlueMix than the AWS. It is because less complexity is involved BlueMix and it is easily achievable. Additionally, it is also to be noted that the number of steps involved in developing and deploying of the application is less than its counterpart that reduces the difficulty. However, it is to be noted that the AWS service offers a more descriptive process of achieving the proposed objective. The descriptive approach can be of assessment for the students, researcher or scholars. Though, considering the mass it will be suitable to state that the level of difficulty in the deemed process is low in the BlueMix in comparison to the AWS.

When AWS and BlueMix are compared in the allocation of the resources it is evident that the former offers more resources like memory, space and others. However, the case differs, if the user wishes to change the size of resources as both the service providers offers the option to change the resource size. With the growth of the software industry, there has always arise a problem in maintenance and cost of the computers. It is not possible for an organization to afford a mainframe for every user. IBM offers the change of the resource and even offers periodic services as per the requirement of the users, the organisation has listed it in their features as capacity planning. Bluemix supports programming languages and their services th help the operations and development. It has the capabilities to manage deploy and run the application that are installed on the cloud. On the other hand, AWS does offer the facility of managing the resources however, they are limited after an extent, the reason for the limitation is the huge resource that the organisation allocates to the users. The technology of AWS took the benefit provided by the user directly. AWS started to provide building blocks that can be change easily with time and enables the user to pay as they use it. The application is deployed by the use of preferred tools or languages of programming. AWS provides a full-fledged cluster of computer that are virtual and are available all the time for customer to get their disposal. AWS is cost effective for users who pay as they use its policy.

Allocation of Resources

There are various organization working on multiple services of cloud. From the developer point of view, the difference that I have drawn it is that I like AWS as it is much better and it is easy to manage, no matter whether the cost is high. The reason for AWS being more expensive is that they wanted to keep an upper-hand in the market so that they can keep on innovating and add services to the cloud providers. If I have to compare in terms of scope and services, in that case AWS is a cloud solution in which I would have various platforms for my own big company with hundreds of applications. Though as a developer it is not that easy working with AWS. But it is truly a versatile platform for Windows and Linux. On the other hand, BlueMix is opposite spectrum of AWS with an open source technology that has an Azure type of experience that is good for primary users. The cloud of Bluemix support tons of services and programming languages that is helpful for both development and operations. Bluemix run, manage and deplpoy applications within a minute over the cloud. The infrastructure of Bluemix are with private network. The IT-start-ups, students, experimental laboratories, from distance basis people are working on same projects all of them use Bluemix as a method of experiment. In the Paas Clouds, AWS ranked 1^st and IBM Bluemix ranked 12^th. AWS is mostly compared with Bluemix, Salesforce Cloud App, Colud Platform for Oracle whereas Bluemix is mostly compared with AWS, Heroku and Azure. The reason for the success of AWS is that the services build by Amazon solves real world problems. It is really a good professional approach and has service approach. It gives an accurate service with wide options to users like business holders. Due to its flexibility, new things has been added into the services, and manage the offers. The complete application increase or either decrease according to the requirement of runtime and it can be paid as per the services. While running or doing any kind of experiment, student usually cannot afford it. So they go for the basic version and start growing their services based on AWS. If the infrastructure of AWS gets disappear then it will shut down Amazon. This would lead to a little change in the core business of cloud services. AWS is culturally customer focused. The core business of AWS has learned to listen to customers want and deliver accordingly. AWS gives smooth touch to the developers’ business for entry and exit. While Bluemix is culturally interested more in the perfection solution for the white paper than listening to the customers wants. Even in most of the review that I have gone through, I found that AWS is among the most successful and biggest provider of cloud. According to the survey of IT security, AWS has owned 37 % of the market of cloud currently. This show how scalable, flexible, and reliable is AWS. Both Bluemix and AWS has similarities in their capabilities for storage, networking, computing and being more flexible. It depends on individual user to choose which service to use.

Conclusion

Conclusion

From the study, it has concluded that, there have been comparative analysis done between BlueMix and AWS. The steps that involved in deploying the “Hello World” application using the IBM BlueMix PaaS cloud services and AWS has clearly been shown step by step. The service provider offers the users the choice of operating system along with the programming language, database, application platform and others services with great ease of use. There have been provided with all the list of cloud service provider that offers PaaS. AWS tools provide features of scalability with the computing infrastructure and Amazon offers reliability over the security and safekeeping of information. The study also provides information about the services offered by the subject that are even cost-efficient for the users. Finally, it was found that the developing and deploying the hello world application is much more comfortable in the BlueMix than the AWS. It is because less complexity is involved BlueMix and it is easily achievable. Additionally, the study has also noted that the number of steps involved in developing and deploying of the application is less than its counterpart that reduces the level of difficulty. However, the AWS service offers a more descriptive process of achieving the proposed objective.

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