Cloud Comparison

Today Cloud techniques are growing more and more. Comparing the vendors is much complex for different aspects of cloud. You need to look at pricing, technology, efficiency etc. Thoran Rodrigues did a comparison with many parameters and it goes like below:

• Cost reductions / optimizations
• Variety of Pricing Plans –The more variety offered (hourly, monthly, etc.) the better a provider is considered.
• Average Monthly Price - Estimated cost in US$ for an instance as described above. When available, hourly pricing was used, based on 730-hour months. Otherwise, monthly pricing was used.
• Cost of Outbound Data Transfer – The cost, in US$, for each GB of outbound data sent from the server. Companies that offer a per second (Mbps) connection for free have costs listed as zero.
• Cost of Inbound Data Transfer – Same as above, but for inbound data.
• Scalability and Automation
• Scale Up – If it’s possible to scale up your servers automatically, by adding more disk space, RAM or processing units.
• Scale Out – If it’s possible to quickly and easily deploy new images based on existing VMs.
• APIs – If the company offers APIs to interact with the servers or not.
• Monitoring – A 3-level subjective scale measuring the easy availability of monitoring tools:
• Poor – Companies that have no monitoring/alert solutions integrated, requiring the deployment of third-party tools or that extra services be purchased
• Average – Companies with very simple integrated monitoring tools (few indicators or no alerting)
• Extensive – Companies with very complete integrated monitoring tools offered for no additional cost
• Choice and Flexibility
• Number of Data Center Locations – The number of different data center locations where cloud servers can be hosted.
• Number of Instance Types – The number of different available instance types, in terms of RAM, CPU, disks and so on.
• Supported Operating Systems – The number of different supported operating systems (regardless of version) available as pre-configured images.

User Concerns

• Security Features
• Certifications – If the vendor has compliance- and security-related certifications, such as PCI or SAS 70.
• Protection – If the vendor offers the possibility of protecting servers with firewalls and other security functionality. A 3-level subjective scale:
• Poor – Companies that only offer the most basic security features (such as a basic firewall), or no features at all
• Average – Companies that offer a more advanced mix of security features.
• Extensive – Companies that offer not only several security features, but also some security automation.
• Ease of Migration
• Open Standards – If the vendor employs or supports open standards in cloud infrastructure.
• VM Upload – If the vendor supports uploading your own machine images (made locally) to the cloud

... To Read More - Top cloud IaaS providers compared - By Thoran Rodrigues