Which "aaS" is Right for You? -from the Eclipse Developer's Journal
(link to original article below
The benefits of doing things "as-a-Service" (aaS) and leveraging cloud-based technologies are well-known and documented, such as a low barrier to entry, reduced capital outlay and infrastructure, easy scalability, and device/location independence. Many companies also appreciate the reliability of service and the ability to leverage specialized domain knowledge expertise from an experienced aaS provider.
However, there is still a great deal of confusion about the many different types of aaS and questions remain over how much companies should rely on the cloud. Specifically, when is the right time to turn to aaS rather than build and manage in-house and what are some of the pitfalls that can be avoided when moving to an aaS-based solution?
Leveraging the cloud and delivered as a service, each aaS has the ability to help you do things faster, better, cheaper. The most attractive characteristic of the aaS movement is a flexibility that allows for an incremental or selective approach to deployments. You don't need to do it all at once, and you can mix and match.
The following is a brief synopsis of current aaS variants, when you should consider them, and what the future might hold for this technology.
First, here's a quick cheat sheet of three most common aaSes:
- IaaS - stands for both Integration-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service
- SaaS - Software-as-a-Service
- PaaS - Platform-as-a-Service
Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) is probably the oldest, and has historically been the most stagnant, of the aaSes. IaaS originally functioned as a connector, providing integration for businesses to transmit documents to each other, such as EDI (electronic data interchange) and VANs (value added networks). Examples of this type of business document interchange go back to as early as the 1960s and really took hold during the '70s and '80s when early service providers helped companies automate this exchange. IaaS improved substantially once documents could be sent digitally over the Internet.
Typically, IaaS provided a backbone network, routing services, monitoring, reporting, and a normalized format to transact messages between business partners. While effective, this first iteration of IaaS failed to exploit the full potential of a rapidly maturing Cloud Computing environment and does not attempt to align the integration with the broader business process, such as supply chain management.
Thus, we move next to Net2 IaaS, a more advanced version, that incorporates business processes. As the key to meeting the needs of your customers, business processes are the lifeblood of your enterprise and demand continuous management and improvement. Net2 IaaS moves you in this direction by building on the simple customer transaction messages of IaaS and extending it to provide data transformation and correlation services. It also enables more policy and business intelligence-based integration processes, including access control rules, exception handling and intelligent reporting, among other capabilities. This is where the technology is today with leading integration vendors.
The next logical step with this aaS we'll call Business Collaboration Integration as-a-Service (BC IaaS). The core component of BC IaaS is the establishment of governance across inter-business services. At this stage, integration, business process management and service-oriented architecture (SOA) come together in the cloud. BC IaaS adds the governance and management through SLAs, advanced compliance and security, and precise message exchange expectations. This approach strengthens customer and partner relationships by establishing firm rules and building trust through transparency - without sacrificing any of the efficiencies and automation of IaaS. The platform also offers the capability of building strong vertical solutions that apply to both specific businesses and industry sectors.
Another, yet different IaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, is just what it sounds like, an outsourced infrastructure that replaces the need to build your own. This includes a secure premise with high throughput Internet backbone connectivity, a continuous power supply, dedicated computer hardware, basic router/firewall and backup services. A variant on this is Virtual Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which we'll call "VIaaS," which uses virtual provisioning to segregate multiple customers' applications on shared hardware. An example of this is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud, allowing customers to pay only for the capacity they use.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is perhaps the best known aaS. This is when a specific piece of software or an application is delivered as a service and available on-demand via the Web for users. SaaS comes in two flavors: UI-based SaaS and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) SaaS.
Salesforce.com (a leading customer relationship management SaaS application) is a good example of UI-based SaaS. Salesforce.com is a pre-canned application exposed as a service, allowing the customer to interact with a Web site to access the application from anywhere. Web sessions are protected by an authentication login, and each company has its own view of the application.
M2M SaaS allows a customer's application to interface with a SaaS application to get information. This can range from basic queries, such as accessing a stock market quote to more complex services. One example would be an ERP procurement application that accesses airline flight pricing information and business rule data in response to an employee's travel request.
A Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) can be used by customers to create and run Web-exposed applications (Windows Azure, Salesforce's Force.com, and Google Web Toolkit are examples). PaaS is typically presented as a design studio the provider makes available to you, where there are widgets you can use to create your own applications. You own the life cycle (including promotion/test) of the application and all intellectual property, even though you are building on the vendor's PaaS. It offers robust fault tolerance and a true virtual machine sandbox with strong data segregation.
The most attractive element of PaaS is that it is Web-exposed. You can create a vertical application and have people work with the application without building out your infrastructure or worrying about stability or performing back-ups. It's another example of faster, better, cheaper.
Clearly, there are a lot of aaSs in IT today. Combined with the power inherent in cloud computing, each of these aaSs holds immense potential. Determining how and when to utilize which technology requires a good grounding in what is available today, what is on the horizon, and, most important, how new deployments will advance your business objectives by anticipating, meeting and exceeding the needs of your customers.
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