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31 Days of Servers in the Cloud: Beyond IaaS for the IT Pro (Part 21 of 31) by Bill Wilder (Guest Post)

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At 12:48 PM on Monday, January 21, 2013, Bill Wilder posted Part 21 of 31 in the 31 Days of Servers in the Cloud Blog Series. Below is a small excerpt from his blog.

As technology professionals we need to be careful about how we spend our time. Unless we want short careers, we find time to keep us with at least some new technologies, but there isn’t time in anyone’s day to keep up with every technology. We have to make choices.

For the IT Pro looking at cloud technologies, the IaaS capabilities are a far more obvious area on which to spend time than PaaS capabilities. In this post, we’ll take a peek into PaaS. The goal is to clarify the difference between IaaS and PaaS, understand what PaaS is uniquely good for, and offer some reasons why a busy IT Pro might want to invest some time learning about PaaS.

While the concepts in this point can apply generally to many platforms – including public and private clouds, Microsoft technologies and competing solutions – this post focuses on IaaS and PaaS capabilities within the Windows Azure Cloud Platform. Virtual machines and SQL databases are highlighted since these are likely of greatest interest to the IT Pro.

The Options – From Ten Thousand Feet

The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (SP800-145) defines some terms that are widely used in the industry for classifying cloud computing approaches. One set of definitions delineates Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). You can read the NIST definitions for more details, but the gist is this:

Service Model
What You Provide
Target Audience
Control & Flexibility
Expertise Needed
Example

SaaS
Users
Business Users
Low
App usage
Office 365

PaaS
Applications
Developers
Medium
App design and mgmt
Windows Azure Cloud Services

IaaS
Virtual Machines
IT Pros
High
App design and mgmt
+ VM/OS mgmt
Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Windows Server, Linux)

Generally speaking, as we move from SaaS through PaaS to IaaS, we gain more control and flexibility at the expense of more cost and expertise needed due to added complexity. There are always exceptions (perhaps a SaaS solution that requires complex integration with an on-premises solution), but this is good enough to set the stage. Now let’s look at the core differences between PaaS and IaaS as they relate to the IT Pro.

Not All VMs are Created Equal

Even though Windows Azure has vastly more to offer (more on that later), the most obvious front-and-center offering is the humble VM. This is true both for PaaS and IaaS. So what distinguishes the two approaches?

The VMs for PaaS and IaaS behave very differently. The PaaS VM has a couple of behaviors that may surprise you, while the IaaS VM behavior is more familiar. Let’s start with the most far-reaching difference: On a PaaS VM, local storage is not durable.

This has significant implications. Suppose you install software (perhaps a database) on a PaaS VM and it stores some data locally. This will work fine… at least for a short while. At some point, Azure will migrate your application from one node to another… and it will not bring local data with it. Your locally-stored database data, not to mention any custom system tuning you did during installation, are gone. And this is by design. (For list of scenarios where PaaS VM drive data is destroyed, see the bottom of this document.)

How can this possibly be useful: a VM that doesn’t hold on to its local data…

You might wonder how this can possibly be useful: a VM that doesn’t hold on to its data. The fact of the matter is that it is not very useful for many applications written with conventional (pre-cloud) assumptions (such as guarantees around the durability of data). [PaaS may not be good at running certain applications, but is great at running others. So please keep reading!]

PaaS VM Local Storage

The PaaS VM drives use conventional server hard drives. These can fail, of course, and they are not RAID or high-end drives; this is commodity hardware optimized for high value for the money. And even if drives don’t outright fail, there are scenarios where the Azure operating environment does not guarantee durability of locally stored data (as referenced earlier).

To get the full article, please read it here: https://blog.codingoutloud.com/2013/01/21/beyond-iaas-for-the-it-pro/

Harold Wong