Can Azure be inter-operable with Amazon?

Question

I have a question about whether cloud vendors have an inter-operable mechanism. For example, I am developing a WCF service and hosting in Azure successfully. After a pro-long time using Azure, can I use the same code for deploying it in AWS? Will it be possible? Does the API of both matches the same for deploying? If not, what are all the extra care needed for hosting the same service when switching over other Cloud Vendors like Salesforce.com, OpenStack, etc.,

Elegiac

Answer 1

In general, you can't just take what you develop for one Cloud platform and put it on another: they have different functionality sets and expose different APIs. However, the more low-level you make your code, the more likely it is that you'll find another vendor with a very similar API, since virtualizing infrastructure is simpler (and closer to standardized) than virtualizing a CMS application.

If you're using just IaaS, you can probably port fairly rapidly but you have to do more work to make your application. If you're using PaaS (or SaaS!) then you're more locked-in but you get more support for developing rapidly: it's that support platform which is both the value-add and the lock-in, and you won't get one without the other.

Tumor

Of course, you could host an environment on IaaS that looked like the parts of PaaS your code is actually using (e.g., a Windows instance which can run a WCF app) but that's very much different to full compatibility of the services themselves. – Tumor

You need to be careful to keep your WCF to just the .NET API and not any of the Azure specific stuff (or introduce some IoC) if you want to also be able to port it to WAS or some other host on Windows Server. I have done this in the past though, written a site for both Azure and non-Azure deployments. – Counterman

@Paul: +1 for the specifics; there's always going to be parts which are more portable and parts which aren't. – Tumor

Answer 2

If you're using an Azure web role for hosting your WCF service then from deployment point of view you will not have many problems with AWS. You'll simply use facilities offered by AWS SDK for .NET (aka Publish to AWS CloudFormation). For sure you'll have to change the logging part if you've used Azure Diagnostic and alla Azure services with related AWS services. We did this multiple times in the last year and it works.

For worker role it's not so simple because in Azure they are easily deployed like web role, but in AWS you haven't direct deployment from Visual Studio so you have to do some manual work using Windows Services or something else

Bandylegged