Open and proprietary cloud services related to SMART4ALL technologies

Open and proprietary cloud services - comparison[edit | edit source]

Cloud services are certainly nowadays very important tools for creating new smart technologies. In the SMART4ALL project they are necessary to use for creating the expected Marketplace facilities.

Cloud services may be divided into two groups: open cloud services and proprietary cloud services. Both have advantages and disadvantages. They are listed in Table 1 with a short comparison of the most common services.

Table 1 Comparison of open and proprietary cloud services
	Open cloud services	Proprietary cloud services
Advantages	• More flexible possibilities of management • Better control panels – a variety of functionalities and more configuration options • Low initial costs of licenses • Users can contribute the source code and make recommendations to the software’s direction	• Vendors provide tests, develop and integrate • Well known solutions facilitate the work of IT professionals • Include signing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) • Most of maintenance and updates related to the owner of software • High quality and stable software releases
Disadvantages	• More complicated management • Most of problems have to be solved by the user or with a help from the community • Bug fixes and new features take longer time to show up in the core code tree • Some hidden costs of installation, support, fixes, upgrades – may be higher than proprietary services	• Higher initial costs of licenses • Limited possibilities of configuration and control • No contribution to the source code • Users are tied to the tools and services from the vendor

Open cloud services[edit | edit source]

Open cloud services have more flexible possibilities of management, are more customizable with better and varied control panels. Users of such services can have strong contribution to the software development direction. Although the initial costs of the licenses are lower than in the proprietary ones, there are many hidden fees: for installation, support, fixes and upgrades. Flexibility and variety of configuration and management cause more complications to solve by the user or a help from the community. There are some services with really good communities, but most of them require a good knowledge of the cloud services from the user. Bug fixes and new features take longer time to show up in the software releases. Examples of open cloud services are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Examples of open cloud services
Cloud Service	Advantages	Disadvantages
Nextcloud	High level privacy encryption, fast and lightweight, customizable, cheap, many applications	Problems have to be fixed manually, user is responsible for updates, security and the file system
OpenStack	Support for public and private clouds, many components, web-based dashboard	Could generate high costs of professional fees
CloudStack	Single API for management, storage for instances running on the hypervisors	Many bugs in almost every new version, not very active forum
Eucalyptus	Interface within the console, AWS compatible, easy installation	Limited customization, problems with configuration
OpenNebula	Simple, powerful and flexible solution, good for private clouds	Lack of some features like object storage, integration
OpenShift (OKD)	Security, automation, scaling, lot of APIs virtualization	Configuration could be complicated

Proprietary cloud services[edit | edit source]

Proprietary cloud services have a lot of benefits. First of all, vendors provide tests, develop and integrate their software, so the user can work with the completely useful and almost bug-free solutions. Moreover, by choosing this kind of services the user gets the signed Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Most of maintenance and updates are done by the owner of the software. Key benefits of proprietary cloud services are the quality and stability. The proprietary cloud services have also some disadvantages like: higher initial costs of licenses (but in long time they may be often cheaper than the costs of maintenance of the open source versions). Some users do not like limited possibilities of configuration and control, but that provides stability and reliability of the software. Examples of the most common cloud services are presented in Table 3.

Table 3 Comparison of most common proprietary cloud services
Vendor	Strengths	Weaknesses
Amazon Web Services	Dominant position, extensive offerings and highly customizable	Difficult to use, overwhelming options, support issues
Microsoft Azure	Integration with Microsoft tools and software, hybrid cloud, support for open source	Issues with documentation and with management tooling, expensive
Google Cloud	Commitment to open source and portability, user friendly	Fewer features and services, some issues during setup
IBM Cloud	Pre-configured tools, customizable, management tools	Setup is not as intuitive as other services
Oracle Cloud	Architecture and storage, free tier	Poor low-end offering, some issues by management

Below we present short descriptions of the cloud services presented in Table 3.

Amazon Web Services[edit | edit source]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud-based program for building business solutions using integrated web services. AWS offers an extensive range of IaaS and PaaS services. These include Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic Beanstalk, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS).

AWS has expanded well beyond cloud compute and storage. If processors based on ARM architecture become the standard in the data center, the industry can thank the gravitational pull of AWS, which launched a second-generation Graviton processor and instances based on it.

Microsoft Azure[edit | edit source]

Microsoft Azure provides a wide array of solutions suitable for all types of industry. Azure means there is no need to have physical servers on site. This reduces the usual costs, such as an onsite server support team.

Microsoft is a known commodity that can plug into Salesforce, which picked Azure for its Marketing Cloud, as well as other incumbents such as SAP, Oracle, and Adobe. In addition, Microsoft can pair its cloud offerings into its Microsoft 365 effort, which is a cloud and enterprise software buffet packaged for various industries but may have hidden costs if not negotiated properly.

Google Cloud[edit | edit source]

This platform enables users to create business solutions using Google-provided, modular web services. It offers a wide array of services including IaaS and PaaS solutions. With Google Cloud multi layered secure infrastructure, users can rest assured that anything they build, create, code or store will be protected. This is done through a commitment to transparency and a highly trained team of engineers.

IBM Cloud[edit | edit source]

IBM Cloud offers a wide range of services. Not all of them are cloud based: it covers both virtual and hardware–based servers, composed of public, private, and management networks.

IBM refers to the hardware servers as ‘bare metal’. These provide clients with sole access to the entire server. This reduces the ‘noisy neighbour’ effect and greatly improves performance.

IBM Cloud Bluemix developing solution has a wide range of cloud SaaS (Software as a Service) management tools.

Oracle Cloud[edit | edit source]

Oracle services are especially strong at supporting different workloads, especially for IoT, OLTP, microservices, along with applications dependent on AI and machine learning. There are two main service provisions available: cloud architecture and storage data.

Cloud architecture includes data management, databases, and applications, while the Oracle Data Cloud is primarily offered for driving big data analytics for business intelligence insights. Oracle also provides a range of SaaS platforms such as HCM, EPM, SCM, and social media tools.

Oracle provides infrastructure, platform, and database, which is increasingly autonomous. Despite its IaaS and PaaS footprint, Oracle is mostly a software provider when it comes to cloud. With the addition of NetSuite, the company can serve small, mid-sized and large enterprises.

Taking into account all above presented aspects, we recommend to choose an open cloud service for the SMART4ALL Marketplace. Such a solution will provide the stability and reliability of tools and maintenance with low costs. The main goal of the SMART4ALL project is creating new technologies. Thus the Marketplace should be a representative product of high quality without bugs and other problems. There are a lot of different offers of cloud services, but after a rather deep market analysis we can suggest to choose the Nextcloud solution.