The choice and what matters to you when you consider a cloud provider is, perhaps oddly, a very personal choice with all sorts of inputs… I saw a post on TechTarget that was all about PaaS – and making the selection of your vendor – being a very personal choice. As they said…
It’s so true. And it’s usually where I end up starting when someone comes to me and starts talking about making platform selection. it’s as much about your own experience and preferences as it is about technical capabilities. Sure, the different features are key, you have to be able to support your application requirements. But the major players are going to do that, by and large.
The *way* they go about doing it, though, can be fundamentally different. And when you choose a proverbial dance partner, it’s not an easy thing to change in the future. So you must choose wisely. It’s like red-pill, blue-pill kind of choices.
It’s the foundation of success with the cloud that you know your preferences. It’s that important. If you don’t have extensive admin experience on-staff and available, you’re going to want to be looking at more managed services than “components as a platform.” (I know, just what we need, yet another term). If you’re looking for an evironment that looks and smells like a co-located server environment, your decisions will be steered toward virtual machine environments.
It comes down to what you truly need, what resources you have, what approach you’re most comfortable with and the vendor relationship and trust you have. These are often not “fill out this questionaire of features and check boxes that apply, please” type questions. These are much more involved and require an honesty about where you are, where you’re going and what you truly need.
Sometimes, the answers will dictate that you make compromises. If you’re short staffed, for example, you may end up choosing managed services type solutions. That may mean giving up a feature, or giving up some bits of access, etc. But if you’re not honest with yourself first (know thyself) and honestly thinking through what will work well for you and your team and requirements, you’re in a very risky place for making choices.
Don’t make a choice of platforms and infrastructure based on wishing you could do X or Y or support X or Y. You’ll be much happier if it’s more closely built to assure success for you based on frank reality.
I’ve always hated people that say “trust me.”
But trust me on this. I’ve been on both sides of this – some where people based requriements on where they wanted, wished or were thinking they needed to be, and some where people were more honest and built in the growth in knowledge and capabilities.
It works so much better with the honest approach.