Major Cloud Computing Vendors

According to Palo Alto Networks (2017), a service level agreement is a contract that is signed by both the end user and the service provider. It is a contract that seeks to outline the degree of service that the client might anticipate receiving from the service provider (Frey, et al., 2013). Service level agreements between the customer and service provider are a crucial part of cloud computing (Patel, et al., 2009). It is important to think about the Service Level Agreement and what the customer will ultimately obtain when choosing a cloud hosting provider. The client want to have a continuous monitoring of the quality of service and the characteristics employed in enforcing them. Cloud hosting companies enter into these agreements with their consumers as a way of ensuring quality service. This essay will compare two selected cloud hosting suppliers based on their KPI's, service level agreements and a recommendation on what the vendors should improve based on the analysis.

The Selected Vendors

The chosen vendors for this analysis are Google and Microsoft. In its cloud hosting services, Google provides cloud computing products services such as PaaS with Google App Engine including Go, Python and Java. It provides SaaS for Google Aps andStorage products using the Google Cloud Storage. However, Google does not offer the IaaS product. On the other hand, Microsoft provides IaaS product through the Microsoft Private Cloud. It gives its customers the PaaS product of Windows Azure including Java, Node, MET, Js and PHP. It also provides storage products through the Microsoft Private Cloud (Berry, 2017).

Comparison

KPI's

Frey, et al., (2013) describes various KPIs that cloud hosting vendors must consider when preparing their SLAs to ensure the efficiency of their services to clients. These KPIs include security aspects, helpdesk, monitoring, availability, reporting and service times.

Google considers various KPIs as a basic requirement for every vended service to its cloud hosting clients. Google allows its customers to check the progress (monitoring) of service through its infrastructure for data analytics. It promises secure and entirely featured cloud for all the enterprises. The business is committed to provide the best services with a leading price-performance (Google, n.d).). It also commits for open-sources to ensure availability for its cloud services at all times. These KPIs ensure the consumer with proper storage, network services, backup and restore assurance of their services from Google.

The KPIs needed in Microsoft cloud hosting vendor include the network efficiency through the SQL server, metadata storage capacity that ensures client applications store and display the accurate findings (Microsoft, 2017). Microsoft provides flexible cloud applications, optimized and fast services, virtual machines in cloud, information security, and a reliable server, Azure enabled services, continuous improvement as well as highly scalable cloud storage (Microsoft, 2017, Woods, 2011).

SLAs

SLAs Pricing

Microsoft Google Microsoft Google

All the following are SLAs for Microsoft

Computer

Networking

Storage

Web and mobile

Databases

Intelligence and Analytics

Internet of things

Enterprise integration

Security and identity

Developer tools

Monitoring and management All the following are SLAs for Google cloud hosting services

Cloud Machine Learning Engine

Google App Engine

Google BigQuery

Google Cloud Bigtable

Google Cloud CDN

Google Cloud Dataflow

Google Cloud Dataproc

Google Cloud KMS

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Google Cloud SQL

Google Cloud Storage

Google Compute Engine

Google Container Engine

Google Prediction API

Google Cloud Datastore

Google Cloud DNS

Google Stackdriver

VPN

No upfront costs

Pay as you use/ Pay as you go subscriptions

Saving up to 40% on windows server virtual machines

No termination fees

Per minute billing

Flexible purchase options

List price leadership

Average compute engine cost is 21% below the list price of other clouds

Customer friendly pricing

No up-front costs

Pay as you go

No termination fees

Savings

Saving up to 60% for computer workloads

24% sustained use discounts

21% list price differences

15% rightsizing recommendations

Pricing innovations

Sustained use discounts

Per minute billing

Coldline

Preemptive VM Instances

Committed use discounts

Custom machine types

Right sizing recommendations

Microsoft. (2017), Google Cloud Platform. (n.d).

Recommendations

Looking at the comparison in KPIs and SLAs, Google and Microsoft do not have mush differences in KPIs since they consider similar KPIs for their services. The SLAs are also abit similar. However, Google has more SLAs than Microsoft. This explains the more costs incurred in Google for cloud hosting than in Microsoft. Google offers more when compared to Microsoft and clients would prefer Google cloud hosting as a vendor because of the more services they will get there and assured of quality through the many available SLAs. Microsoft needs to increase its services and SLAs to encourage more clients.

References

Berry, M. (2017). Major Cloud Computing Vendors. Business Technology News & Insights. IT Manager Daily. Retrieved from http://www.itmanagerdaily.com/cloud-computing-vendors/

Frey, S., Luthje, C., & Reich, C. (2013). Key Performance Indicators for Cloud Computing SLAs. EMERGING 2013 : The Fifth International Conference on Emerging Network Intelligence. ISBN: 978-1-61208-292-9

Google Cloud Platform. (n.d). Google Cloud Platform Service Level Agreements. Terms. Retrieved from https://cloud.google.com/terms/sla/

Google. (n.d). Build What's Next: Better software. Faster. Google Cloud Platform. Retrieved from https://cloud.google.com/

Microsoft. (2017). Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Multidimensional Models. Technet. Retrieved from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174875(v=sql.110).aspx

Palo Alto Networks. (2017). What Is A Service Level Agreement? Cyberpedia. Retrieved from https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-a-service-level-agreement-sla

Patel, P., Ranabahu, A. H., & Sheth, A. P. (2009). Service Level Agreement in Cloud Computing. http://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/knoesis/78

Microsoft. (2017). Service Level Agreements. Microsoft Azure. Retrieved from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/

Microsoft. (2017). Microsoft Build 2017. Retrieved from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/?v=17.14

Woods, J. (2011). Google, Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon: How Cloud Computing Changes the Vendor Landscape. Gather the Future of IT Conference. Retrieved from http://gartnerinfo.com/futureofit2011/MEX38L_A4%20mex38l_a4.pdf