Public or Private Cloud: Which Is Best for Application Marketplaces?
June 20, 2012
Cloud computing offers almost limitless possibilities for innovation and growth. It also provides fodder for endless debates about the pros and cons of hosted and on-premise software deployments.
In one corner, you have the advocates of hosting software in the public cloud who argue that it offers better flexibility and scalability. In the other corner, you have proponents of private, on-premise deployments who counter that this approach is more secure and offers greater control.
The growing popularity of cloud service marketplaces – application stores that offer a range of cloud-based software and services – is adding a new dimension to these familiar arguments. Which type of deployment, public or private cloud, is best for marketplaces like these?…
It’s an important question, since deciding where to host an application store can impact the entire ecosystem for cloud-based solutions, from the big-name brands that operate marketplaces, to developers who create applications to sell in them, to the end-user customers who come to rely on these solutions.
Hosted Versus On-Premise: Which Is Better?
To pick a public, hosted solution or a private, on-premise deployment that is the question and the arguments on both sides of the debate will be familiar to cloud computing experts and novices alike.
In a public cloud deployment, security, infrastructure, software updates, data backups – and any number of other activities, both large and small – are completely taken care of so companies can focus on their core business.
In an on-premise, private cloud deployment, companies are responsible for every aspect of operating the software, from building the right infrastructure, to ensuring security, to backing up data, to hardware and software updates, and more. That often means a greater management burden and less flexibility, but companies also gain complete control over their environments.
Deepening the Debate: Marketplace Owners and Developers
Even with a flexible solution, however, service providers will still have to decide where to host their application store. As demand for cloud-based software and services continues to increase, the public versus private cloud debate is becoming more important, particularly for marketplace owners and developers.
Given the massive infrastructure investments that many service providers make – in state-of-the-art data centers, for example s it seems only natural that they would want to host applications in their own environments. This way, these providers can make sure that the apps they offer are secure and meet performance expectations.
But that doesn’t mean developers are always happy to comply with an on-premise arrangement. With this type of implementation, the on-premise version of the application may be "locked" behind a firewall, making it especially difficult for developers to keep their products up-to-date.
There are other problems, too. As Andy Sen, SVP of engineering at AppDirect, explains, "If developers let their applications be deployed on multiple environments, they lose economies of scale that come with a single-instance, multitenant model. Beyond that, to deploy on multiple points of infrastructure, software vendors also need to architect their applications so that they can be implemented on different types of servers. This is a big job, and sometimes smaller developers just don’t have the resources."
The traditional, on-premise model can also present problems for marketplace owners. Some developers who have created larger, more well-known applications may simply refuse to lock down their software. This limits the ability of marketplaces to attract the top applications that their customers demand.
On the other hand, some developers are less concerned about their products being locked down because marketplace owners can often give applications exposure to a wide, sometimes global customer base. By the same token, some marketplace owners are perfectly happy to adopt an open hybrid model that gives them the ability to offer applications that are hosted in either public or private clouds.
The cloud service marketplace sector is still relatively young, so this particular debate is just getting started. Is a hosted, public cloud model best for the rapidly growing market for SaaS applications, or is the on-premise, private approach better? The only way to know for sure is to launch a marketplace and find out.