The most important technical criteria when choosing a cloud provider include performance and scalability. Performance can be measured by metrics for data access and processing. These include available CPU cores, RAM, and mass storage, each billed per unit of time. Usually, the customer can choose between different types of technologies used, e.g. AMD vs. Intel processors, HDD vs. SSD storage etc. In addition, there is incoming and outgoing data traffic, billed according to the amount of data transferred. It is important that the resources used can be scaled as needed.

The performance metrics refer to the maximum expected performance, but are not enough in themselves to evaluate a cloud service. For a meaningful evaluation, you need information on the reliability and availability of the service. To specify high-availability services, availability is often given as a percentage. A commonly encountered availability is 99.999% – also known as “five nines”. If a service is 99.999% available, it is expected to have a downtime of less than one second per day. To ensure the high availability of systems, they are kept redundant in globally distributed data centers.

It is also important to keep an eye on the future development of cloud technologies. This includes the expected availability of new services, applications, protocols, and interfaces. Ideally, the provider should make a test environment available. This allows customers to see for themselves the performance of new technologies and approaches.

Posted by Charlie Brown