These are exciting time for computing in general and specifically for Cloud computing. There are several vendors offering cloud computing followed by many services (PaaS, SaaS). Recently Informatica (The data integration company) announced their PaaS offering with Amazon’s EC2 cloud . This got me thinking about what IT leaders need to consider to make sure that full value offered by Cloud computing (Elasticity, Agility and possible spend shift from CAPEX to OPEX) is realized? This is a starting point checklist of items to consider while making investments in PaaS (both short term and long term investments).
For most of the following points, I am assuming that IT already has on-premise solution/investment of some kind and now IT is exploring investments in the cloud computing/PaaS offering to reap the benefits offered by these computing models.
Integration between PaaS and On-Premise Offering:
1.What level of integration does vendor offer between on-premise software and software offered as PaaS? This integration question becomes very critical when IT is trying to reuse their code/efforts investments done on the on-premise platform for reuse in the PaaS offering.
This integration could be at metadata level, data level or API level (or all of the level mentioned). Again, key here is can IT deploy any work done on on-premise platform seamlessly on the PaaS platform without significant efforts or redoing the work again in PaaS environment?
2.Is this integration seamless enough to allow exchange of data, metadata messages and error handling across PasS and on-premise platform (both run time and design time)?
These are critical points to consider for developing an understand about what level of IT investments done in on-premise platform can be reused during PaaS adoption, or in rare case event where one has to migrate PaaS applications to on-premise platform (or migration from cloud to cloud)
Feature level differences between PaaS and on-premise offering
1.What level of feature based gaps exists between PaaS offering and Platform offering? If there are gaps in features offered between these two offering, what is the roadmap of the vendor to bridge those gaps, are there any alternatives (third party or workarounds) to bridge those gaps?
2.Gaps in the area of Security, Encryption and Performance should raise red flags.
3.If there are gaps in the area of application integration, IT may not be able to fully realize the past investments and IT leaders should evaluate economic impact of these gaps in a short run as well as long run.
Cost and Licensing:
As PaaS offerings are offered as separate offerings, most of the time licensing models for PaaS are different than those offered for on-premise offerings, following should be evaluated carefully while considering PaaS offering
1.Can IT use PaaS offering (with no additional expense – my wishful thinking) if they already have enterprise license for the on-premise version of the platform?
2.Are there any discounts offered for PaaS licenses if IT already has enterprise licenses?
3.Is licensing different for Dev-QA/Prod environments? (This is where integration becomes critical, can IT develop and QA applications in on-premise platform and then seamlessly migrate those to PaaS?)
Administration
Ease of administration and management of the platform is critical aspect. Again, if the platform is packaged tool set (as integration tools), then one needs to carefully evaluate cost of administrating PaaS and On-premise implementation
1.Is administration integrated between two offerings? Can administrator administer both platforms from one console?
2.Is there enough flexibility provided (at least to match up with on-premise offering) such that third party monitoring applications can be integrated with PaaS to ease administration and management of the PaaS offering.
Upgrade/Product Roadmap
If PaaS offering is not exactly same as on-premise platform offering (Features, functions, integration etc…) then, IT needs to find out
1.What is the roadmap for PaaS offering? How often features and functions will be made available in PaaS offering (to bridge the gaps between PaaS and on-premise platform)?
2.How often will be the upgrades done to PaaS offering? What will be methods and protocols? Are upgrades optional and can be scheduled by IT or will vendor drive the upgrades and take responsibility for the upgrades?
3.Are there sandbox environments available to evaluate features and functions before upgrade from one version to another?
Other considerations:
1.Will developers need to be retrained to use PaaS?
2.What are the SLA’s for PaaS (I imagine that these might be different from the cloud infrastructure) uptime/availability?
3.Is PaaS support/support agreements different than on-premise agreements?
In conclusion, while there are many exciting developments happening in the cloud computing and services offered by vendors in the cloud (PaaS), do your homework from all aspects before committing to any specific PaaS offering from a short term and long term impact/objective prospective.
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