Which Cloud Provider Should I Use?
This article will cover your top 3 considerations when choosing a cloud provider.
- Security
- Cyber Crime is on the rise, how disastrous to your business would a breach be?
- Will only trade secrets be lost or will you expose customer financial data?
- If the latter happens, what is the cost to your business? Weigh that against the potentially lower pricing that companies offer.
- Migration Support and Lock In
- Most cloud providers have very good support to migrate your data in, but very poor to migrate it out. Look around on stacked exchange to determine the most recent stories of data migration.
- How good is their support for open standards like MySQL and MongoDB? If their support is not good, then it is hard to structure you data for minimal lock in.
- Pricing
- Cloud providers are only competing on price to get you as a customer. After that their goal is to continual raise their prices to the point just below where you leave and keep it there. The more you use their services, the more they will raise the price on you. Be mindful of this and design your system to keep you lock in low to facilitate switching providers should the possibility for major savings arise.
- Their pricing is often very straight forward from an engineering perspective, $.20/hr for this processor, but it is very hard to aggregate into usage until you are already using a cloud provider and have a baseline. Realize that you will probably spend more than you projected to.
Why did I not talk about capabilities?
The capabilities between different major providers(AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM) is nuanced and converging. AWS got out to an early lead in the space so they have more options now, but they are continually losing ground since its harder to create new service that it is to copy existing ones. As of now all providers have the same services available. The nuances will be covered in separate articles.