The deep end of the pool

When we think about Cloud computing two big players come into mind; Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). A lot of people think that ‘Cloud is Cloud’ so both of them must be offering the same product, right? Well, one major difference between the two may change this point of view. Their philosophy of cloud development is radically different.


Before talking about those philosophies, another obvious difference must be mention. AWS is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) while Azure is a Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Because a Cloud infrastructure is analog to a Grid infrastructure, processing can be distributed between multiple instances. So, for a process to really use the Cloud power it should be highly parallelized. Also, anybody that look into Cloud development long enough realizes that scalability and reliability can only be achieve through an abstraction layer (PaaS) that will manage self contained tasks and will be resistant to the failure of one or many instances. Finally, we also know that the state of availability in a Cloud will change over time. A Cloud process must adapt to that change and should proactively monitor availability instead of stopping when encountering availability issues.

This level of development architecture is not easily achieved. Developers who find that simple are most probably using other important principles like multi-threading and error recovery. This can all be done on a multi-core computer. When you add the complexity of distributed computing (grid computing), development architecture becomes even harder.

Now, back to philosophy.

When approaching Cloud Computing, the architect of a non-optimize system must decide to either, continue using their current philosophy or upgrade it by including parallelism, resilience to task failures and adaptation to changes in availability. This can be an overwhelming task and some architects choose the status quo.

The difference between Microsoft and Amazon is that Microsoft’s Azure is adhering to those optimization principles and therefore steer the users toward developing that way. On the other hand Amazon provide access to a bare bone IaaS the lets you run your processes no matter how non-optimize they are.

So, there you go. For non-optimized developers, developing with Azure is like learning to swim by jumping in the deep end without a flotation device.


I like the challenge!