1. Improve agility of IT and business units
2. Drive innovation for new revenue generating products & services
3. Simplify M&A with faster & more attractive deals

First of all, the Cloud services offered by AWS enable you to improve agility of your IT and business units. It allows companies to focus on their business: do more, do it faster, and with fewer resources. This is largely caused by the Managed Services nature of a lot of the services, as well as the high levels of intelligence and automation that are built into the platform. In addition, AWS offers self-service infrastructure, which means you can set up your infrastructure in a few clicks, thereby eliminating the need for complex capacity planning, logistics, staging, etc. In my previous post, I mentioned an IDC research of AWS customers, which showed benefits in various areas:

• Enhanced Agility – This time-to-market benefit is often cited as the key reason for adopting cloud services. For example, one company related how computer simulations which used to take 2-4 days could now be done in a half hour reflecting a 99% improvement in business process.
• Faster time to market – Applications were developed and deployed in 79% less time and required 77% – 86% fewer developer hours.
• IT Staff Efficiency – AWS had significant impact on application development and deployment, reducing overall developer hours by 80%
• IT Staff Productivity – With AWS, IT staff productivity increased by 52%, saving $150,000 per application

Some of the world’s most respected companies have experienced the increased agility that the Cloud offers. For example, Shell’s VP of Architecture, Johan Krebers, has said that “the AWS Cloud brings business agility as Shell is able to deploy services much more quickly.” And Jeff Kimsey, VP of Project Management for NASDAQ, stated that his company was “… able to leverage AWS and decrease our time to market threefold.”

Secondly, the Cloud can help to drive innovation for new revenue generating products and services. In a typical on-premise environment, most companies spent 70% of IT time and resources on ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting’ of infrastructure, and only 30% of time and resources are available for innovation and focusing on the core business. With AWS, this ratio swaps around entirely, and we hear that customers can spend 70% of their time focused on innovation and developing new products, services, and business models. The time spent on infrastructure is reduced to 30% or less.

This focus on innovation, research and development has been experienced by Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. According to Dr. Michael Miller, Head of HPC for R&D at Pfizer, “Pfizer did not have to invest in additional hardware and software, which is only used during peak loads; that savings allowed for investments in other Worldwide R&D activities. AWS enables Pfizer’s Worldwide R&D to explore specific difficult or deep scientific questions in a timely, scalable manner and helps Pfizer make better decisions more quickly.”

Finally, the Cloud helps PE firms and M&A teams to simplify the M&A process, and enable faster and more attractive deals. This is caused by the Cloud’s ability to help you ‘decouple’ business units and facilitate the carve-out process. With all IT functions in the cloud, you can create self-contained business units with no external dependencies. This enables easier and quicker carve-outs, with rapid untangling of companies/BU’s/JV’s and quick handover without the burden of (long-term commitments to) fixed assets. It also makes it easier to acquire and integrate. As such, business that have their infrastructure and ERP applications (e.g. SAP, Oracle, Ramco)running on the Cloud, are more self-contained and hence easier to buy/sell. This makes for more attractive deals.

In conclusion, there are very tangible benefits of leveraging Amazon Web Services as a tool for financial and operational streamlining. To start the process, there is no need to do a Big Bang. You can explore where it makes sense and look at your workloads, applications and business processes and start with the quick wins. Over time, the benefits will become increasingly tangible, in both operational as well as financial impact.

Back in the day, the VC / PE firms often worked with the CFO’s of these companies to recapitalize the business and improve the balance sheet and income statement through smart financial engineering. Nowadays, late stage VC’s and PE firms tend to go beyond financial engineering, and have started to act as full-fledged operators to increase margins. And they expect their CFOs to work with them in these endeavors. As such, CFOs are now expected to not just improve the capital structure of the business, but to get deeply involved operationally and drive value creation in two key areas:

• Financial Streamlining – streamline the balance sheet & P&L by reducing operational costs and moving assets off balance sheet
• Operational Streamlining – so as to make companies more agile, grow revenue, and simplify operations

CEO’s and CFO’s are increasingly looking for ways to achieve this streamlining. Traditionally, the focus has been on production: streamlining the manufacturing process through process improvements. What we are seeing at Amazon Web Services (AWS), is that IT can be a very powerful tool in both financial and operational streamlining, and that by harnessing the power of the Cloud, CFO’s can create tangible and significant value for their business and their investors. The Cloud enables streamlining in several ways:

In the remainder of this post, I will explain more about how to leverage Cloud for Financial Streamlining. When doing this, it is important to understand the key benefits of AWS’ business model: strictly Pay-as-you-Use, with no CAPEX, no long term contracts, no commitments, and no lock-in. A first key benefit of this model is how it enables you to run your IT infrastructure off-balance sheet. Rather than invest CAPEX in physical IT assets that are on the balance sheet, your key IT resources are completely converted into OPEX. A research of AWS customers conducted by IDC that was published in July 2012 entitled “The Business Value of Amazon Web Services Accelerates Over Time” [1]showed that “companies were able to replace $3.66 in capital costs with $1 in new operational expenses in their annual budgets”. Beyond analysts, our customers are seeing how this works in practice. “With the AWS cloud we were able to avoid $34 million dollars in capital expenses,” .Said Mr. Chun Kang, Principal Engineer at Samsung Electronics.

Secondly, CFO’s can leverage the Cloud to increase capital efficiency and Return on Assets (RoA). Many IT assets are highly underutilized, thereby having a negative impact on your RoA. For example, some industry analysts have said that average system utilization of server farms is around 10-15% and that typical utilization of storage (excluding RAID and System resource overhead) is still only 60%. In short: expensive equipment on your balance sheet is mostly idle without adding value to a company’s ability to generate revenue. The Cloud enables you to fire up servers when you need them, and shut them down when you don’t so you’ll immediately stop paying. You can even fully automate this process to maximize utilization by elastically using only what you need. Similarly, with storage in the Cloud you pay only for the storage you use, per GB per month, so that you never invest in assets that you don’t actually use or need. In conclusion, Cloud services like those offered by AWS allow you to significantly increase the Return on IT Assets by eliminating idle, capital-inefficient resources.

Finally, and most importantly, the Cloud can help you to avoid the need for investments in hardware, and/or increasing capacity due to higher resource efficiency. The Cloud also help to reduce the costs of IT resources. For example, AWS has leveraged its economies of scale to reduce its process 26 times since 2006. In addition, the Cloud offers many ways for automation so that companies are able to reduce costs of personnel due to reduced need for admin and support activities. The above-mentioned IDC report showed that companies were able to reduce IT-related labor costs by 52% and average savings per application were $518,990 per year. The same study showed that the combined costs for server, storage and network support costs are reduced by 68% which includes the cost avoidance from not having to increase staff to meet new business requirements.

In conclusion, the Cloud platform offered by AWS can be leveraged by CFO’s as a powerful tool to create value through financial streamlining. The second post in this mini-series will explore how PE firms and the CFO’s of their companies can leverage Amazon Web Services for Operational Streamlining.

What is cloud storage?

Cloud storage provides the ability for enterprises to store data in virtualized storage pools that are hosted by third parties. This data is always online and can be made accessible to users through various channels.

Why do enterprises need data access across channels?

The proliferation of data consumption channels has led to a need for multiple applications and devices to work on the same dataset. The need for devices to seamlessly access data has added a new dimension to workforce mobility.

While consumers have embraced the diversity in the mobile ecosystem, enterprises have struggled to come to terms with the rapid explosion in consumer devices and platforms. Yet, there exist the opportunity for enterprises to simultaneously improve user productivity and engagement.

What are characteristics of a good data storage solution?

Good data storage solutions provide users with unfettered and up-to-date access to information on the move, while ensuring minimal data losses. Thus, any modern day storage solution requires the ability to:

• Incorporate multi-channel access
• Resolve concurrent edits
• Push real time updates
• Provide offline storage capabilities
• Customize access to resources based on permissions and roles

I have analyzed some of the commonly used data storage solutions and highlighted some of the key concerns with selecting external data storage/sharing provider at this moment.

A detailed analysis of security and collaboration features is available here.

Verdict

Box currently provides one of the most enterprise friendly versions of these storage solutions with multi-language API clients, which provides the ability to integrate with its service and customize as per enterprise requirements. However, while this is quite comprehensive, it can be quite daunting for the smaller enterprise, which might feel that a simpler solution may be the need of the hour. Dropbox seems to be well suited for the personal computing/small business owner as it seems to focus on ease of use and simplicity of interface.

As an organization, we use both Dropbox and Box for collaboration but are slowly migrating all our content to Box. Box provides a better granular access control framework which allows us to work with customers and collaborate among our team as well. We are also evaluating both SkyDrive and GoogleDrive as alternatives. However, Google’s unavailability of file locking is a significant feature for us, and we would ideally like Google to plug in that before we seriously consider adopting their service. What Google does well, although, is having a better way of enforcing role based access controls and having in-web viewing /editing of content (on mobile and desktop).

What about creating customized ‘BYOD’ solution to access data?

Multi-channel, by its very nature, throw up a few teething problems. Imagine reading a 100 page PDF report on your mobile device. In addition, there are security issues inherent with a mobile device, as the devices typically work on a network outside of the enterprise firewall.

There are a few cross platform tools in the market that provide the ability to create solutions over different channels. However, ability to view content which is adapted to the form factor and enforcing proper security controls are two key missing models which enterprises need to retrofit onto these solutions – and this can be an expensive proposition.

We, at Native5, are attempting to solve this problem through Prism – an application development platform that provides the ability to develop, deploy and manage applications across the entire digital ecosystem. The platform has in-built security features and has connectors that integrate with Dropbox, Box and Google Drive.

About the author:

Barada Sahu ‘Barry’ is the co-founder of Native5, and chief architect of Prism – a cross platform application development tool. He is a seasoned IT architect with over 10 years of experience in building enterprise and web based applications. Barry loves building robust software and is an avid champion of open source tools and technologies.

1) What is this “cloud” business? Isn’t that marketing jargon for hosting? And,

2) What about the security of my data?

But a year later, I saw a shift happening. It is no longer about what the cloud is, but more about what I can effectively do with the cloud. The two most common queries I get today are:

1) Is the cloud worth it for me? What about my existing investments (read hardware, software licenses or in-house apps)? And,

2) How will I manage cloud based apps? Won’t this make my environment more complex?

This shift in concerns tells me that the market has matured considerably and enterprises have evolved from being skeptics to adopters. But with the availability of a range of solutions and offerings under the cloud umbrella, what I still find most fascinating is the sheer lack of understanding about what should qualify as cloud computing and how is it really different from hosting. In order to be fair to the technology, any attempt to define cloud computing must include a quick primer on its evolution.

What started as “co-location” a few decades ago, i.e. shared hosting of one’s servers in a third party data center, soon evolved into “hosting”, which means servers owned and managed by a third party that are rented out to multiple organizations for running their business applications. This is still one of the biggest revenue earners for some cloud providers and the Indian hosting market itself was close to a few billion dollars in 2012. The next stage in the evolution was outsourcing, or better yet, total outsourcing, which moved not only the machines and software, but also human resources and services to third parties.

The “Cloud”, in its modern avatar, has happened in the last few years, driven primarily by the need to drive down costs further through both scale and scope. This shift was made possible because of technologies like virtualization and remote application management.

What differentiates cloud computing from its erstwhile predecessors are the following concepts:

1. Self-service

Today, one can logon to a website, swipe a credit card and order servers (actually virtual machines), databases, complex vertical business platforms or complete readymade applications. The fact that you can order these online is not what differentiates cloud, but the fact that it is created automatically by the system (provisioned) after the order is received, without any human intervention (workflow) is unique to cloud computing. The technology makes the experience worthwhile and the costs affordable.

2. Pay-per-Use

This feature is what makes cloud computing efficient and intriguing, and is the primary culprit responsible for the unprecedented adoption of cloud computing in such a short period. Like any other utility service (phone, electricity etc) cloud computing changes the business model from CapEx based on-premise model or OpEx based hosting model to an OpEx based pay-per-use model. A typical cloud platform monthly bill looks very similar to a phone bill, with charges based on usage of compute, storage, database, egress etc listed in detail. The pay-per-use model has not only changed the enterprise budgeting framework, it has also revolutionized the start-up ecosystem, which thrives on bootstrapping and low initial cost structures.

3. Multi-tenancy

Having one hosted application being used by multiple customers is not a new concept, but cloud has made it ubiquitous due to implementation of automated data isolation algorithms and superfast time-to-market frameworks. With a cloud platform as the foundation, even a small start-up can provide a solution to multiple customers without incurring large upfront costs. An application written for the cloud can include multi-tenancy best practices in the code itself: such as creation of new database instances for every new customer added or isolated access control logic for each customer.

4. Auto-scaling

Adding additional servers or database instances automatically when user load goes up and dropping them when user load is low, is a feature unique to the cloud. The application code can now include logic which automatically adjusts infrastructure scale based on policies linked to the business model. So an online consumer application that provides live cricket scores will add more resources when the World Cup is on and reduce them during off-season, usually without any human intervention. The customer experience does not suffer during the world cup and the costs stay low in the off-season.

5. Build complex cloud application from existing cloud applications

Since every application in the cloud is a service, one can find an app to address any business problem today on the cloud, ranging from demographic data to payment gateways to geospatial data. The ecosystem is putting this concept to good use with thousands of apps available on cloud marketplaces that solve very simple to highly complex problems addressing the needs of consumers at one end of the spectrum to large enterprises at the other end.

What stands out in all of the above is the dependency on availability of technology that can deliver these features in the time and at the scale demanded by today’s businesses. This technology is not driven by advances in hardware, storage or networking. The magic is actually in the software. Whether it is cloud platform providers like Microsoft offering “public cloud” services from their own datacenters or large enterprises trying to convert their existing datacenters into a “private cloud”, it takes specialized software to deliver a true cloud experience that includes all of the above features. Within the enterprise datacenter, cloud computing concepts such as self-service, pay-per-use, multi-tenancy etc take a slightly different form, but the essence stays the same. Self-service refers to employee portal based requests; pay-per-use is replaced by usage based chargeback and multi-tenancy becomes multi-departmental data isolation. However, private clouds are inherently limited in their scale and may not offer the efficiencies derived from public cloud environments, but both have their distinct advantages. Enterprises today are evaluating cloud adoption strategies based on their own application usage scenarios and specific business needs.

About the author:

Vikram Bhatia (Tweet to him @vikram2000) is the Product Marketing Lead & Business Head for the Windows Azure Cloud Platform for Microsoft. He is based in New Delhi. Vikram is a graduate from IIT Kanpur and also holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.

For the 31% of startups that were not currently using a cloud provider, we asked them if they were actively considering moving to the cloud in the near future. Of them, 35% were actively considering moving to the cloud in the near future. A further 28% were at least partially considering moving their main product to the cloud.

We then asked the startups what the most important criteria were for choosing a cloud platform, and an overwhelming 88% of them picked the “ability to scale seamlessly” as the most criteria for choosing a cloud platform. Reliability and Ease of Use came closely second and third as the most important criteria for picking a cloud provider. Interestingly, Support for favorite technologies (like .NET/JAVA/TomCat etc…) came in last in terms of must-have features for picking a cloud technology platform.

Finally, we asked the startups that are currently on the cloud which cloud platform they’re currently using. AWS is the clear market leader with over 50% of the startups surveyed using Amazon’s cloud. Google App Engine and Windows Azure come in at number 2 and 3, and the Rackspace cloud was at number 4 with roughly 6% of startups using the platform. There’s a long tail of cloud providers including SoftLayer, CTRL-S, Heroku and others that are also being used in startups.

This is a part of the “Cloud Adoption Among Indian Startups” report created by YS Research. To find out more about how to buy the full report, please email chandan@yourstory.in

The next wave of computing is slowly surrounding us, and most of us are not even aware of it. So, I thought it would be a great idea to throw some more light on this quantum shift in computing.

Sun Microsystems was founded with the premise ‘Network is the Computer’ – Sun will be cursing themselves when they changed it to ‘We are the dot in dot-com’ because it morphed it to ‘we just stepped on the dot-bomb’. Sun never recovered, and it finally got acquired by Oracle. (Now, Sun’s server technologies are boosting Oracle’s performance on data servers with Exadata (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/exadata/database-machine-x2-8/overview/index.html)) – Today, network is indeed becoming the computer; However the clients are no longer ‘thin’ in the perspective with which the caption was coined.

The problem at hand (literally and figuratively) for mobile users used to be the computational power. With dual-cores and quad-cores and high-end GPUs becoming common for high end smartphones, and tablets, the problem of computation at hand has been greatly mitigated.

However, there are cases when even this computation is not enough:

1. There are problems that require ‘server-cloud’ levels of computation
2. The problem at hand might require a lot of data to be processed which again is a limitation for the mobile device (esp when tera-bytes of data is involved in making decisions)

So, the next level of evolution in computing is to split the computation between mobile device and the cloud. Amazon does it with its Silk Browser, Apple does it with Siri, Microsoft does it with TellMe, and Opera (browsers) do it with Opera Turbo.

What happens in all the cases above is that a part of the computation is done in the device, and another part is executed in the server / cloud side. The results are then combined and presented to the user.  This is now made possible because of the increased compute capability of the mobile devices, faster algorithms (MapReduce that work on Big Data) on the cloud and most importantly, faster wireless connections (WiFi / 3G / 4G).

The technology involved is definitely challenging.

1. The architectural challenges involve where the computation should be split – How much is done in the mobile device and how much on the server?
2. What is the cost (in terms of bandwidth, delay in computation etc) in sending the data down to cloud?
3. How secure is the connection? Are privacy issues involved?

Right now, these technologies are being used for some limited problem set only. However, just as we saw that mobile apps which were typically working within the realms of the device, started to access the network more and more, we’ll definitely see the next shift that will offload the computing to the cloud as well.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google are well poised to lead this  from the front. Apple at this point of time, does not have any cloud offering, but it might make sense for them to tie up with some cloud provider to provide such capabilities in the near future! (Waiting for an ‘I said so’ moment J)

To conclude, get ready and think even bigger! Each of your app can have almost infinite computing power, and access to terabytes of data. Unleash your mind and get that next big solution cracking!

Third-party market research report positions Trend Micro as the leading provider of cloud security software.

Trend Micro, the global cloud security leader, is the major player leading the fast-growing Global Cloud Security Software market, according to TechNavio’sGlobal Cloud Security Software Market report.

The current overall TechNavio estimate for the global cloud security software market was valued at US$241 million in 2010 and is expected to reach US$963.4 million in 2014, growing at a CAGR of 41.4 percent.Of the four major players in the global security software market, Trend Micro leads with the greatest estimated market share. The report points out that Trend Micro is able to dominate the market because of its diversified geographic reach, established customer base, and brand reputation. The company’s partnerships with cloud and virtualization service provider, VMware, and partnerships with companies such as HP, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft Corp., Oracle, and Wipro, also were cited.

According to the report: “The main drivers for the Global Cloud Security Software market are the growing use of cloud services for critical data storage and the sudden increase in cloud-specific attacks. Driven by multiple factors such as flexibility, cost saving, and availability, an increasing number of companies are transferring their data to the cloud.”

“Trend Micro’s dominance in the cloud security marketis the product of the focus and dedication our company has poured into cloud security innovation, which has enabled us to extend the reach of the global cloud infrastructure while maximizing security, reducing complexity, and providing a better user experience,” said Amit Nath Country Manager India and SAARC Trend Micro.

This recognition follows on the heels of Trend Micro being positioned as the leader in corporate endpoint server security and the leader in worldwide virtualization security management market by IDC’s “Worldwide Endpoint Security 2011-2015 Forecast and 2010 Vendor Shares” and  TechNavio’s “Global Virtualization Security Management Solutions 2010-2012” reports positioning Trend Micro as the leader in corporate endpoint server security and the leader in worldwide virtualization security management market.

Within the virtualization and cloud space, Trend Micro offers two flagship products: Trend Micro™ SecureCloud™ and Trend Micro™ Deep Security™.

Trend Micro SecureCloud provides data protection for public and private clouds and VMware vSphere virtual environments, using encryption with policy-based key management and unique server validation. This protection safely and easily secures sensitive data stored with leading cloud service providers keeping data private and helping companies meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Trend Micro Deep Security is designed to provide system and application security across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Deep Security meets the challenging operational security and compliance needs of today’s dynamic data center.  It combines intrusion detection and prevention, web application protection, firewall, integrity monitoring, log inspection and anti-malware capabilities in a single, centrally managed enterprise software solution. Deep Security also provides the industry’s first and only agentless security suite for VMware environments, enabling enterprises to attain even higher consolidation rates, faster performance, better manageability and stronger security.

TechNavio defines cloud security software as software that provides security to cloud-based services or cloud computing architectures. Cloud security software can be a standalone solution or a suite of products. It focuses on the security of key parameters such as compliance, governance, data protection, architecture, and identity and access. A typical cloud security solution offers features such as encryption, identity and access management (IAM), endpoint monitoring, vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection, and application and messaging security.

Image Credit: http://technology.inc.com

To deliver agile projects with continuous integration approach there are significant coordination that is required between Software Engineering, QA and Release management teams. DevOps tries to eliminate a good portion of manual activities through technology. In the absence of DevOps prior to cloud, these teams use/used disparate tools and technologies that are not integrated/don’t talk to each other. Many of the inter-team touch points are managed through processes outside and filled through manual work. Naturally there is good possibility for quite a few things to fall through the crack. DevOps’s promise is to fix issues around this area. Without a cloud based Dev/Test/Deploy model (read as pre-cloud era) it is even hard to visualize a solution for those issues. While DevOps is a form of “Technology Convergence” at a lower level of operation/software production, it is not the same kind of “technology convergence” that I wanted to cover in this post. Most of the general purpose PaaS (gPaaS) providers like Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Heroku and others cover a portion of the DevOps capability. That is one reason why OrangeScape is different and why we complement and not compete with GAE and Azure. BTW, take a look at this presentation: 5 Cultural Hurdles to DevOps

“Technology Convergence” – I am talking about is in the area of “Software Engineering” for building business applications especially the enterprise ones. For an enterprise class business applications there are a number of puzzle pieces that need to come together.  Often times in large enterprise projects different products, each specializing in their own area, are brought together by software system integrators like TCS, Accenture, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and the likes. For workflow / business process management (BPM) they choose between Savvion, Lombardi, Intalio and the likes. For Business Rule engines they choose among the likes of Fair Issac, iLog, Pega (now positioning themselves more broadly). For data model/persistence the choices are Hibernate (for Java), N-Hiberator (for .NET) and Oracle’s Toplink. For web services/integration capabilities libraries like Apache Axis have to be integrated. For the presentation layer, your choices are various MVC frameworks between JSF, IBM’s XPages, ASP. NET MVC Framework, JFace and the list is long. In large end-user companies like Pfizer, Unilever, Coco-Cola there is a very big “Enterprise Architecture” group whose job is to make sure all these pieces carefully handpicked to create a enterprise standard and keep the enterprise standard continuously updated as the technology world changes by the year.  Yes – I see what you are thinking, large enterprise applications are one mega gluing projects. Leave alone the technology integration challenges – you have to deal with tons of political and pushing-the-ball-to-others-court issues all the time.

Luckily, there are PaaS vendors who go beyond just DevOps and solve the meatier – Software Engineering issues to help enterprises build sophisticated applications with much less challenges. Obviously, OrangeScape is clearly in that list of PaaS vendors who solve this problem very elegantly and I will let you figure out where our competitors stand on this!

Let’s start from seeing the “Platform” story prior to Cloud. Enterprise IT did a lot of heavy lifting. They hand crafted the platform by combining various products like App Servers, Web Servers, Databases, Middleware, Integration Servers, Portal Servers, Workflow Engines and so on.

Not only did Enterprises IT create a unique combination for them, they also ended up redundantly deploying it for various projects within the enterprise. There was no common or central runtime platform, although they always intended to create one. In most cases, it was an approach or a blueprint.

A runtime platform was constructed every time as per the blueprint for every project. Looking back it sounds draconian but that’s what everyone did happily and some of them continue to it every today – not realizing that’s exactly what PaaS does. For any enterprise that is not in the business of creating and selling software, it does not justify internal development when off the shelf option exists and all the more true for platform software.

Platforms on the Cloud

As we see in this picture, all the different technology pieces of the platform have already come together as a pre-integrated stack. There is a tectonic shift in the value proposition of ‘Cloud Platforms’. This value proposition revolves around ‘Abstraction’ and giving up the fine grain control. In the case of platforms like OrangeScape and Force.com – it actually goes beyond the infrastructure or middleware level abstraction, to the ‘application’ level abstraction.

All these technological advancements coupled with delivery model & business model innovation by providing it ‘as-a-service’ and ‘pay-by-the-drink’ brings in a tremendous amount of disruption. This presents an opportunity to move away from large cap technology expenses and to align technology costs directly with business growth.And, evidently, IT leaders need to watch out for this huge shift.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series – How convergence of various technologies creates a perfect storm of Cloud.

With all these, I thought it would be a good attempt to demystify different platform categories in the cloud with some vendor examples. There are 2 board categories of PaaS platforms

a)      aPaaS – Application Platform as a Service   b) iPaaS – Integration Platform as a Service

In this post, I want to focus on aPaaS – i.e. Application PaaS. There are 3 categories of aPaaS: 1) Instance PaaS 2) Framework PaaS 3) Meta data PaaS

Instance PaaS :Is Suitable for moving existing applications to a Cloud Platform. Example, if you have applications developed using .NET or Java then you can consider slapping those existing apps on Azure or Amazon’s Elastic Bean Stalk and make a move to cloud. However, bear in mind is a lift and shift approach and is not the most optimum technical solution – while it might met get you Tick marks in your marketing collaterals. The central issue around this option would be the architecture of our existing application may not comply to Cloud’s Stateless Architecture that gives you the transparent scale out option.

Framework PaaS : In this option programmers have to comply to the constraints of the framework. However, the good thing is the framework takes care of automatically deploying the application on as many compute nodes as it is required for the traffic/load at any given point in time. This essentially is like app server in the cloud with built-in load balancer, web server and app container. And, in some cases, like Google’s App Engine a database – big table – is also provided. App Engine and Heroku are good examples of framework PaaS. This type of PaaS is suitable for building new consumer facing (B2C) web applications. Moving existing code to these will require good amount of rework – if not a heart surgery.

Meta data PaaS : This type of PaaS can be visualized as a layer of abstraction on top of Framework PaaS. In many ways it provides all the good things for a framework PaaS and more. This is suitable for developing transaction oriented B2B business applications. Examples like are SaaS applications like CRM, SFA, Dealer Management, Agency Management and the likes. Force.com and OrangeScape fit into this category of PaaS. These cloud platforms typically feature a visual studio for designing/modeling the applications and a runtime that executes the application. There are capabilities to design data model, workflow process, UI / Forms, integration tasks and reports. Enterprise IT teams, System Integrators, Service Providers will benefit from this – Meta Data PaaS – at OrangeScape we call it ‘Visual PaaS’.

The bottom line: It is important to understand the trade-offs to make a good choice between these 3 categories of PaaS – that is:

• Abstraction vs Granularity
• Modeling vs Programming
• Productivity vs Control

Separating the User Interface. Similar to how client server applications were designed the user interface is separated from the business logic server and client interfaces with the server in a flexible contract, say XML. The choice of communication can be a simple XML over Http or REST/SOAP over Http. Mobile apps have their own specific languages and tools to develop them, web applications can be developed in Html/Javascript or using tools such as GWT/Flex. These interfaces leverage the native device, mobile or the desktop browser to render the User Interface and in turn reduce the load on the server.

Standalone Business Logic Server. Backend business logic servers are designed as pure SOA stateless services exposed via XML over Http. The stateless nature of these services helps scale up or down seamlessly based on load. As business logic is separated from user interface both can be tested independent of each other and the loose coupling also helps them to evolve more independently. A number of solutions are available to scale the business servers. Scalr is one of the earlier ones on Amazon Cloud and now Amazon has an in-built scaling mechanism in its services.

Distributed Database and Storage. RDBMS databases though not designed to leverage distributed computing natively have a surprisingly large number of add-on solutions to make them scale. Solutions vary from having a distributed cache in front of a database to a Master Slave architecture to separate writes and reads. Xeround has a distributed scalable database service and now Google App Engine offers a SQL database service as well designed for scale. Another way to scale transactional data is to embrace document database model where a host of services from CouchDB to MongoDB are available out of the box. Document database model has the added benefit of flexibility in changing the business layer faster but will need throwing away the familiar SQL for a custom API interface to the data layer. Scaling file storage is a lot simpler than the database with services from Amazon S3, Hadoop readily available to use.

No, not this type of platform

It can be argued that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) have been sufficiently commoditized so as to neutralize any “breakthrough” competitive advantage they might originally have presented.  In simple terms, once everybody’s doing it, you have to do it just to keep pace.  If only one bank had Automated Teller Machines, that bank would have a big advantage.  Today, things like ATM’s and online banking are commodity offerings.  Without them, a bank could not stay in business.  We’re rapidly getting to the point where the same can be said for enterprises that don’t recognize and exploit the value of IaaS and SaaS where appropriate.

So, what is PaaS?

PaaS stands for Platform as a Service.  In essence, it offers companies a way to develop applications without having to invest in platform infrastructure, specifically the computer hardware and software necessary to build and run the application.

This means saving money in more ways than just the hardware and software investments, though. Hardware needs a physical place within the enterprise to reside.  Electricity-hogging cooling systems must be put in place, and there has to be some provision for disaster recovery.  And, once that is accomplished, the system must be maintained.  Sounds like fun, no?

But it’s way more than just the hard dollar savings

What about the advantage of allowing your IT Department to build and deploy applications quickly and securely?  This is invaluable.  No one knows your business as well as you do.  While best of breed packaged solutions will always have their place in the enterprise, to optimize your competitive advantage your IT Department has to be able to develop applications that are suited to the way your business works.  (Which, of course, is why you spend so much time and money customizing those best of breed solutions.)  You have to have an agile solution that allows IT to utilize not only its technological skill but also its knowledge of your business.  And, as PaaS evolves, so will your IT Department’s ability to maximize its value, as more and better development tools become available.

Platforms in the Cloud

IT can be more important than ever, but not just as the guys and gals who fix things that break or customize and re-customize software that will never do exactly what you need it to.  Your company’s IT Department can now be the vanguard of something truly revolutionary.  With PaaS, even the small enterprise can do what was once available to companies with vast resources; develop Web applications that fit exactly what your business needs.  And as you evolve these Web apps, staying ahead of the competition will remain a product of your ability and imagination, not the number of machines you can afford.

Modularize functionality and code
Separate high frequency points in the application from low frequency points. Keep functionality that is absolutely necessary for the experience of the customer separate from that of features that are not core and turning them off will go unnoticed by half of your users. Because in most applications the high frequency features are few but they actually use most of the computing power, hence the maximum cost of running. If time comes and your current service cost becomes prohibitive you will be ready with a module that will give you better price advantage in case you move to a competing provider.

Ignorance is no bliss
Do no new development in environments where you don’t have direct access to the database and installed software versions. Though these kind of environments are easy to use, they are the most difficult ones to get rid of, because you have traded freedom for the ease of use. Instead understand the structure of your application and take control of the operating environment. In case you have to move, it will be easy to recreate the operating environment on a new service.

Understand your cost to code and cost to run ratio
For most switch in cloud environments you will need developer time if not to modify your code base to unit test critical parts. Having the cost perfected, you will be able to precisely calculate at what level of price increase it becomes viable to switch cloud provider.

Have option 2 and 3 in mind
No two applications are similar so the choice of the cloud should be made with the applications usage in mind. Example, if your user base is predominantly Indian, hosting on Joyent may be a bad Idea but not for all applications, some Facebook apps irrespective of their usage work good on Joyent. So, understanding your application and the no.2 and no.3 homes for it will prepare the developers better if and when switch is required.

Have a Rockstar SysAdmin
Though this is true always, especially switching environments at times could be a frustrating experience having a good nerd here will keep things sane.

This list is not comprehensive, it just lists things that are easy to do before hand. Most of you may already be doing some of it, if not a quick discussion with your team may get the thought process going. When you talk about application scale and server cost, things move pretty fast, slowing down to do a little bit of thinking  will make you comfortable. Watch your wallet because people out their want your money!

What are your views on this story? Leave a comment.

Good Understanding of Web Technologies

A decade back, it was the WWW that introduced the concept of statelessness to the traditional client/server developers. Today, it forms the core of distributed computing. It is very important that you have a strong background of developing web applications on a modern stack like ASP.NET, JSP or PHP. Understanding how to design for the stateless web and how to make individual web pages share common data is essential. It is imperative to appreciate the way HTTP works and the protocols like SOAP, REST, POXand JSONfor the flexibility that they offer.

Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

The experience of developing a large SOA solution is certainly a big plus for cloud developers. First, it was XML Web Services that showed the world that the websites can talk to each other and then, SOA demonstrated that disparate enterprise applications can talk to each other. SOA is based on the principle of loosely coupled systems. Developers are encouraged to think modular when designing these components. These modular components are loosely coupled through Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) or an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

When architecting for cloud, it has to be kept in mind that one cannot have an affinity between web server, app server and the database. That’s because one will never know which tier will have to scale dynamically. At one point, there may be the need to scale out the web server to address the demand in the traffic. If the app server is becoming the bottleneck, it may have to be scaled out to a bunch of servers and only a few web servers might be talking to the app server cluster. The database on the cloud is completely a different ball game altogether!

Developers would be leveraging the write-once-&-read-many data model supported through BLOBS (Amazon S3 and Azure BLOB) or write more often to a flexible entity model (Amazon SimpleDB and Azure Tables). There’s also the option to use the traditional relational database on the Cloud (Amazon RDS and SQL Azure).

The bottom line is that the cloud app should be designed to work in the most autonomous form. Each of the tiers should be designed to work independently and should gracefully handle the outages and the non-availability of other tiers in the system. The below architectural diagram depicts this to some extent:

So, finally answering the question of ‘am I ready for the cloud?’, if the above made sense to you and you relate to the concepts of Web and SOA, you are almost there. But the truth is, cloud is not meant for freshmen with no experience of distributed computing. So, the next time someone is pitching to you a job-oriented course on cloud computing, be wary of it!

For regular updates on Cloud Computing, do follow http://cloud.yourstory.in/ 

10. Only the CIO is concerned about cloud

While the CIO is the decision maker and may take the final call on investing in the Cloud, there are a few other stakeholders who will get impacted by this move. The IT department, business managers and also the end users should be proactively engaged in the discussions to understand the implications of partially or completely moving to the cloud. It is certainly not a silent backend version upgrade or hardware replacement. With the right level of planning, cloud transition can be made transparent to end users and knowledge workers of the organization. The bottom line is every key stakeholder of the organization should have the basic understanding of cloud computing and what it means to their organization.

9. Cloud bypasses software licensing

This is a debatable point. If users choose to move to a PaaS offering like Microsoft Windows Azure Platform or Google App Engine, they might be able to save on some licensing cost that you would otherwise spend. But if they move to an IaaS offering like AWS or GoGrid, they are still responsible and accountable to software licenses. Though the hardware and servers do not run within the organization, the users are pretty much accountable for the software licensing on the cloud. So, moving to a virtual physical server or a cloud server will not short-circuit the path of software licensing. The subscription fee that users pay to the cloud infrastructure vendor covers some of the core licensing requirements like OS and DB. Talks need to be held with the commercial software vendor for their special licensing offers for the cloud.

8. Cloud is open

Moving to cloud will not automatically make apps more open. Unfortunately, cloud is not immune to vendor lock-in or platform lock-in. For example, once users decide to consume the storage from a service provider, the app will be tightly coupled with the APIs and the dynamics of the storage service. It is complex enough to move data from one service offering to other similar service offering. Finalizing the cloud vendor is as crucial as deciding on the platform. Once a user signs up with a vendor, there will be no option but to start consuming the supplementary services like auto load balancing, CDN, extended security, media streaming etc. There is a huge opportunity for the ISVs to build a “middle ware” for emulating cloud neutrality.

7. Everything on the web is cloud

This is a classic myth. Not everything on the WWW is cloud. A service has to support 4 tenets to be qualified as Cloud. They are 1) Elasticity, 2) Pay-By-Use, 3) Self-Service and, 4) Programmability. Google Apps qualifies to be a cloud service (SaaS) because it supports most of the above tenets. But a simple web app or a web service just doesn’t qualify to be a cloud service.

6. Cloud will instantly make my app secure

While it is true that the cloud provider will harden the core infrastructure and may not be as vulnerable as plain vanilla hosting provider, users still need to implement security best practices for the application. Precautions need to be taken against SQL injection attacks and the likes. There is also the need to maintain good web application security standards. Vendors like Amazon also provide multifactor authentication and virtual private cloud bringing in additional level of security layers.

5. PaaS enables copy & paste of the application to cloud

Both Google App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure platform have some limitations. Thanks to Windows Azure Native Execution Mode, users can run applications in Full Trust Mode. But Google App Engine imposes quite a few restrictions that will force users to rethink of the design and architecture. File I/O, sockets and multithreading will have a lot of issues. On Azure, users get to partition your app for the Web Role and Worker Role. Communication between Web Role and Worker Role needs additional design considerations. Data access demands redesign. Users have to think about how to leverage flexible entities, blobs and the standard relational databases on the cloud.

4. Cloud has a steep learning curve

There are developers who argue that cloud is the successor to .NET, Java and LAMP platforms. Some of the training organizations in India started to offer cloud computing courses to undergraduate students. While cloud is certainly the platform of the platforms, it is not a replacement or a successor to existing platforms. It is more of a change in thinking than learning something from the scratch. Cloud has deep roots in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

3. Everything should be on Cloud

One hears of developers wanting to move their blog to cloud. Only when a high degree of special abilities like reliability, scalability and availability is required should cloud be chosen. Moving non mission-critical web application to cloud doesn’t offer any advantages. Cloud works when the application demands heavy resources and when virtually unlimited computing power and storage is required. Moving a static site or a blog to cloud just doesn’t make sense.

2. Cloud is cheap

Cloud is not cheap. The biggest advantage of moving to cloud is avoiding an upfront investment on infrastructure. It is the equivalent of opting for an Equated Monthly Installment (EMI) instead of a one-time payment and hence, it will result in paying more than owning or co-location of servers. Here is a cost analysis (dated but still applicable) of own servers, co-location and Amazon EC2.

1. Cloud = Web Hosting

This is undoubtedly the number one myth about cloud Computing. At least one in every three developers/entrepreneurs thinks this way about cloud.  Hosting a web site or exposing a XML Web Service is not cloud computing. The diagram below addresses the differences between hosting and cloud computing:

The biggest concern and risk involved in moving to the cloud is security, privacy and reliability. Most of the customers would want to know what lies beneath the cloud platform before betting their business on it. Making the cloud transparent, open and interoperable will enable better adoption by businesses. This is where the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) will act as a catalyst. The CIOs would want their teams to setup and play with the same stack before actually moving to the Cloud. Knowing that it is the same software that powers their infrastructure at some unknown corner of world will bring a level of comfort to the skeptical decision makers.

The private cloud Computing offerings are now available from VMWare, Microsoft, IBM and others. But it is still not clear whether these are the same offerings that power the commercial public cloud offered by the Cloud providers. For example, Microsoft categorically mentions that Windows Azure, their cloud OS is not available as a retail OS that the customers can implement in their data centers. It is also unclear whether Microsoft’s private cloud offering based on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V is the same that is powering its public cloud, the Azure platform.

Cloud & Virtualizsation

Before looking at the critical contribution of FOSS to the Cloud, it’s important to understand the typical cloud computing architecture. At the heart of the cloud is virtualization. To bring the elasticity nature to the cloud, Virtual Machines (VMs) should be dynamically added and removed on-demand. To manage these VMs efficiently, we need a special piece of software that is called the Hypervisor.

These Hypervisors can be added to the existing Operating Systems. Some of the modern Server OSs come with the Hypervisor built into them. Ubuntu Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ship with KVM and Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Edition has a Hypervisor built into it. VMWare, the pioneer in virtualization has some of its Hypervisors like ESX 3.x which are Open Source. The most popular Hypervisor is an Open Source implementation called Xen. Xen is already shipped with the Linux Server editions of SUSE, Debian and few flavors of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because the VMs are the workhorses of the Cloud and Virtualization, the OS is just limited to booting up and running the Hypervisor.

To avoid the overhead of the OS, Hypervisors are now shipped as standalone layers which do not need a separate OS to boot. Most of these standalone Hypervisors are wrapped within Embedded Linux. They make the OS completely redundant and can also boot from a USB flash disk. It is hard to imagine this architecture without Linux and OSS forming the core. Though Microsoft had made its Hypervisor, Hyper-V Server free, you still need to invest in costly management software, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to administer, manage and monitor the VMs. The most successful commercial cloud implementation, Amazon Web Services (AWS) run by Amazon is powered by the OSS Virtualization platform based on Xen.

After looking at the OSS Hypervisors, the next layer in the stack are the VMs. VMs are just the virtualized instances of the typical servers that run in the data center. These server VMs represent the messaging, database, collaboration & portal, web and application servers. LAMP is undoubtedly the most popular stack that is powering widely used applications on the web including Facebook. When a user signs up with Amazon EC2 to run the server instances in the cloud, there is a huge collection of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) built on Linux and FOSS and that are available at a nominal price. Remember that users only pay Amazon for the computing power and storage that is consumed and there is no need to worry about the license fee of the software that you use within these AMIs. For other commercial software, Amazon assumes that users have a valid license to run the software and the users are completely liable and accountable for the software licenses.

Apart from the custom Line-of-Business (LOB) applications on LAMP, there are some really powerful frameworks built on OSS. A significant part of the web today runs on Open Source Content Management System (CMS) frameworks like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. To really exploit the power of on-demand availability of computing power, Apache foundation has released Hadoop. Hadoop is an Open Source framework to process huge datasets leveraging the computing power from dozens of servers. Hadoop enabled The New York Times to convert 4TB of raw TIFF data to an indexed, search-able digital archive of 11 million PDFs in just 24 hours costing them only $240! That is just unimaginable and only demonstrates what open source and the cloud can achieve together.

The other area that is gaining ground is the private cloud. Private cloud promises the benefits of the cloud computing while running in the enterprise data centers that are secured behind the firewall. The most popular private cloud implementation comes from Eucalyptus Systems. This was started as a research project by the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara before it was distributed through Ubuntu Server by Canonical that promotes Ubuntu and other OSS.

When the enterprise and the government want to have a combination of private cloud and public cloud to form the hybrid cloud, these OSS implementations will be really handy. Sensitive customer/patient/citizen data can reside on the private cloud thus respecting the privacy and adhering to the local regulations but can leverage the power of cloud by moving the non-sensitive, compute intensive tasks to a public cloud.

In my last piece, we discussed what cloud computing meant exactly and tried to unravel the lingo behind the technology. In effect, cloud computing did sound like a technological panacea from utopia for all problems for elastic computing and storage.

However, it is not so. There are some significant technological and political challenges that need to be overcome, before riding the wave on cloud.

Security

This is probably the most significant challenge that an enterprise has to overcome before trusting their sensitive data to a third party storage provider. Cloud service providers have to establish to their customers that the data is secure. This is done by providing a ‘Service Level Agreement’ (SLA). Security does not just mean ‘away from the prying eyes of hackers’. It also means that the data is physically secure. That is, all the data of the enterprise is not lost because of a disk failure or fire accident. Clouds typically handle by caching data and backing up across data centers.

Geo-Location of Data

This is more of a concern for government agencies on the political boundaries where the data is stored. Some governments have restrictions that its data can be stored only within its political boundaries to avoid sensitive data, falling in the hands of its political enemy (or WikiLeaks ). In this case, geo-redundancy, which is one of the actual advantages of moving to a cloud-based infrastructure, is a counter-point for its adoption!

Availability

TheSLAundertaken by cloud providers typically indicate that minimum availability of the data that has been uploaded to the cloud. Though 100% availability is usually desirable, typical rates are in the range of 99.9% to 99.95%. Some also have penalty clauses that would reduce the cost of cloud subscription if the provider does not meet the terms offered in theSLA. But the typical penalty (to the provider) is in terms of more cloud compute/ storage. So, the possibility of becoming a ‘cloud millionaire’ using these penalty clauses is usually remote.

Technology Challenges

Not all cloud technology is plug-and-play. Even enterprises that want to walk the ‘cloud way’ may not be able to do that because of incompatibility or legacy technologies that the enterprises may be wired (locked) in. For example, probabilities of finding a dancing penguin in the middle ofSaharadesert is slightly higher than finding a cloud infra provider for running COBOL apps that take care of data in mainframes.

I really don’t want to be the bad guy here. I spoke of advantages of cloud in the previous installment and I have been only complaining this time. I hope no one started an immediate migration to cloud based on my previous article.

Cloud technology is new and the logic is sound – “don’t pay for the resources that you don’t use, if you can”. Cloud offers a way to do this, with other benefits. An enterprise has to carefully weigh the pros and cons, and existing political scenario before choosing a cloud provider, if at all you need one.

Despite all the seemingly big disadvantages, I am reminded of the ‘network is the computer’ slogan of erstwhile Sun Microsystems. There were slightly ahead of their time (at least, in their slogan). These are times when storage and computing are actually on the network!

My forecasting skills are not known to be legendary. But we can safely conclude that the cloud is here to stay, for a while. Jump into the bandwagon, only if you want to!

This is a guest column by Sriram V Iyer, Co-founder, United Mobile Apps (check out their story by clicking here). To read his earlier column on Nokia’s plans with Qt, a cross-platform toolkit, click here. Also, check out his piece on the iOS v/s Android battle with respect to the problem of fragmentation faced by app developers, by clicking here.

Also, do share with us your thoughts & views on this story by writing to us at feedback@yourstory.in.

Girish

Microsoft is an entrepreneurial company by nature. Entrepreneurship, you could say, is in our DNA. We have a number of programs to support startups – we’ve been doing this for a while now, but over the last couple of years, we’ve renewed our focus and now, we are more committed than ever to growth of the startup ecosystem.

And let’s be honest. We strongly believe that, for us, today’s startups are tomorrow’s customers or partners. Our offerings and initiatives are designed in such a way that small startups and companies can accelerate their growth through them.

Our first initiative was a program called BizSpark. It’s a hugely popular program, and the eligibility is simple: Any software startup, that has been in existence for less than three years (even if it is in the ideation phase), is eligible for this program, as long as they are making revenue that’s less than one million dollars.

To put it simply, we are supporting intellectual property (IP) creation from India. The program is specifically designed for companies creating software-based products. Through this program, we provide the selected companies access to Microsoft’s extensive software portfolio, free of charge, for three years with support. Participants are also connected to a global network of mentors, partners and investors.

Since its launch in 2008, Microsoft BizSpark has attracted more than 38,000 startups worldwide, out of which around 1300 are based in India. On the BizSpark website, we also have a section on business and technology training. We facilitate extensive connections between the stakeholders in the ecosystem. The free software that we provide as a part of the BizSpark program includes our cloud computing platform (Azure) as well, because a lot of companies are now hosting directly on the web.

So, the first part of our offering is giving software-based startups access to the extensive portfolio of our software.

Our second offering is BizSpark One. This is a program for selected startups and it works by-invitation only. In practical terms, it is not possible for us to help every single startup on a one-on-one basis. So, we choose a few, based on the potential of the startup (we see whether they have some interesting applications), the strength of the business plan and how compelling their story is.

So, BizSpark One is a program for high potential startups. When a startup meets the criteria for BizSpark One, they get very tailored, highly customized help from Microsoft, in the areas of both business and technology.

And the best bit is, we don’t charge or take any equity from startups. In BizSpark One, so far we have three startups enrolled from India and 60 startups from across the world.

The third offering is a dedicated support engine for product companies that are building their products on cloud and mobile. For instance, if there is a startup that wants to migrate their offering to cloud/mobile, and we have a dedicated engine that helps them.

The fourth offering is called Microsoft Technology Centre, or MTC. MTC works with a few startups that need architectural guidance, proof of concept, etc. The MTC is based out of Bangalore here in India, so any startup that requires support in these areas can come down to our office and the MTC team will help them out.

But personally, the most heart-warming component of support from Microsoft is the tremendous amount of goodwill employees have for startups. These guys have their day jobs to do, obviously, but they are so passionate about supporting startups that they actually take time out to help startups and entrepreneurs solve specific problems.

Besides that, Microsoft’s office space is open for startup community meetings. Over weekends, a lot of startup communities have their gatherings here. We also run BizSpark camps. Held across the country, they are focused around the BizSpark community.

And finally – the best for the last – we just launched a 100,000 dollar grant for startups. This is an additional support initiative that we are carrying out in India right now. It’s called the India Startup Challenge. Again, there’s no fee to apply for the grant nor do we take any equity in return. So, if you’re an entrepreneur or someone working with a startup and believe that you’re building some fabulous software, do check out http://www.microsoft.com/india/bizsparkstartupchallenge/ to apply for the $100,000 grant.

I recently came across this post on Quora that talks about various hosting options for Indian startups and found it very informational – http://b.qr.ae/IndianStartups-HostingOptions. Many early stage startups are faced with the question of where to host especially as they get off the ground. Key questions they have are: what are my hosting options, costs involved, what other aspects should I consider and what are other Indian startups doing? I have tried to collect data to answer some of these questions. This is particularly aimed at startups that are just getting off the ground (very early stage) and not for ones trying to optimize performance/cost.

Note: The intention of the article is to help early stage Internet startups get quickly off the ground using hosting services. Inputs regarding various services mentioned in the article should not be considered as an endorsement by the author or the organization he is associated with.

Comparison of various hosting options

Here’s a quick summary of comparison between various hosting options (both in India and the US) for an early stage startup. Please note that these are just off the shelf monthly prizes (based on assumptions of usage as outlined in the table) that we could get either from the web or by calling the company. Obviously rates would change based on your particular requirements as well as your ability to get discounts such as yearly subscription, etc.

Key takeaways:

• Amazon’s AWS offers the most cost-competitive option (at least for the configuration mentioned).
• If you are focused on hosting in India (particularly for latency reasons) E2E seems to have a reasonably priced offering. I haven’t been able to talk to someone hosted on E2E and hence don’t have too much information on them.
• If you go with AWS and want to improve your performance, you can refer to the Quora post referred above that talks about using Cloudfront (CDN) for optimizing latency as well as hosting non-latency sensitive workloads in the US and latency sensitive workloads in AWS Asia (APAC).

Getting off the ground

If you are just getting off the ground as a startup, your easiest bet might be to go with a cloud based provider. The costs for setting up are not high and it is also scalable (elastic) depending on the demand (which is usually tough to predict in advance). In addition, some of these services (e.g. Amazon, Rackspace, E2E) are quite granular and so you can pick and choose configurations that work best for you (computing, storage, bandwidth, etc.). One caveat I gathered from talking to startups is that you need to have someone on your team who understands configuring these options. For example, if you are going with Amazon’s AWS, you need someone who understands and preferably has worked on it before. In particular, you need someone who understands the components of your application, various pieces of the AWS system (EC2, EBS, S3, CloudFront, etc.) and failure points so as to mitigate and avoid data loss. Don’t get me wrong, this is not very hard to configure and get going. But, it still is not trivial to take for granted and that is why the startups I spoke to recommended having a person familiar with the setup onboard. Alternately, you could start with an option that provides a simpler holistic solution (e.g. SliceHost) albeit at a slightly higher cost. You could then graduate to one of the other cloud providers at a later point on a need to basis.

Where are startups hosted?

And finally, you might wonder what other startups in your similar shoes (or ones that are further along) doing? I polled close to a dozen startups (small but good group of tech savvy startups) and 80% of them are hosting in the US. Of those, one third are hosted on Amazon’s AWS. If you are in a startup that has gone through a similar exercise of picking a hosting provider, would love to hear from you on what your experiences have been and any tips for others who might follow your footsteps?

Anand Daniel is a seed/early stage venture investor with Accel Partners (accel.com). He was previously an early stage investor with Boston based Flybridge Capital Partners and corporate VC firm Intel Capital. He blogs about his experience moving back to India and being an early stage VC in India at www.ananddaniel.com