Top 3 cloud services

In a multi-cloud world, organizations may use different cloud providers for multiple capabilities concurrently. Most of the cloud service providers (CSP) out there offer high-quality services, with excellent availability, high security, good performance, and customer support. But the market is dominated by a top three—Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. While these three cloud providers collectively dominate this sphere, their approach to cloud computing is strongly dictated by their background.

Compute, storage, databases and networking


                       For compute, AWS’ main offering is its EC2 instances, which can be tailored with a large number of options. It also provides related services such as Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment, the EC2 Container service, AWS Lambda and Autoscaling.Meanwhile, Azure's compute offering is centred around its Virtual Machines (VMs), with other tools such as Cloud Services and Resource Manager to help deploy applications on the cloud, and its Azure Autoscaling service.

Google's scalable Compute Engine delivers VMs in Google's data centres. They are quick to boot, come with persistent disk storage, promise consistent performance and are highly customisable depending on the needs of the customer.All three cloud providers support relational databases - that's Azure SQL Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Redshift and Google Cloud SQL) - as well as NoSQL databases with Azure DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB and Google Bigtable

AWS storage includes its Simple Storage (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Elastic File System (EFS), Import/Export large volume data transfer service, Glacier archive backup and Storage Gateway, which integrates with on-premise environments.Microsoft’s offerings include its core Azure Storage service, Azure Blob block storage, as well as Table, Queue and File storage. It also offers Site Recovery, Import Export and Azure Backup.All three typically offer excellent networking capabilities with automated server load balancing and connectivity to on-premise systems.

Pricing

                    Pricing can be a huge attraction for those considering a move to the cloud, and with good reason: there has been a continued downward trend on prices for some time now as the big providers compete. However, making a clear comparison can be tough as all three offer slightly different pricing models, discounts and make frequent price cuts.

All vendors offer free introductory tiers, allowing customers to try their services before they buy, and typically offer credits to attract innovative startups onto their platforms as well as 'always free' tiers with strict usage limits.

For example, Google offers free usage up to 1GB of Google Cloud Datastore capacity, 28 instance hours per day for Google App Engine, one micro sentence per month for Google Compute Engine, 5 GB-months of Google Cloud Storage (regional only), 2 million Cloud Functions per month, 50GB of logs with Stackdriver for monitoring, as well as limited access to products like: Google Cloud Natural Language, Cloud Vision API, Kubernetes Engine and more.

Customers

             A high-profile user base may not be the main reason for choosing your cloud provider, but it can help more cautious organisations understand how the public cloud is benefiting others in their sector.This is clearly a strong point of AWS. It has increasingly taken on large customer deals. For example, although the US Central Intelligence Agency eventually signed a contract with IBM, it awarded AWS a contract to build its private cloud in a one-off deal in 2013, which could be seen as a symbolic moment for potential buyers.

A longstanding AWS customer is Netflix, which eventually decided to shut all of its data centres in a final move to the cloud in 2016. But aside from web pioneers, AWS has been truly successful in convincing more traditional businesses to move to the cloud.UK bank HSBC has opted for Google Cloud for its analytics and machine learning capabilities. However, HSBC is taking a clear multi-cloud approach, partnering with all three providers for different workloads.

Agile Road map - 7 stages

"Breakthrough products don’t come from thinking small. They don’t come from the fear of losing ground, either. They come from thinking big and responding to change better than everyone else. "

                        -Janna Bastow, Co-Founder of Mind the Product and ProdPad.

An agile product roadmap revolves around desired goals and outcomes, instead of features or timelines.With an agile roadmap, you can communicate both your big picture narrative—that pie-in-the-sky vision—and the series of steps you anticipate will help you

meet that vision over time. The steps matter, but they also don’t.

Technology will change, new and unexpected markets will open up, business will boom or suddenly drop, and all of these changes will affect what you’re able to build both in the short- and long-term. You can’t exactly know what you’re going to build ahead of time, but you can plan for how you’re going to respond to change in order to keep on track with your innovative vision.

• Stage 1, the product owner identifies the product vision. The product vision is a definition of what your product is, how it will support your company or organization’s strategy, and who will use the product. On longer projects, revisit the product vision atleast once a year.
• Stage 2, the product owner creates a product roadmap. The product roadmap is a high-level view of the product requirements,with a loose time frame for when you will develop those requirements. Identifying product requirements and then prioritizing and roughly estimating the effort for those requirements are a large part of creating your product roadmap. On longer projects, revisethe product roadmap at least twice a year.
• Stage 3, the product owner creates a release plan. The release plan identifies a high-level timetable for the release of working software. An agile project will have many releases, with the highest-priority features launching first. A typical release includes three-to-five sprints. Create a release plan at the beginning of each release.
• Stage 4, the product owner, the master, and the development team plan sprints, also called iterations, and start creating the product within those sprints. Sprint planning sessions take place at the start of each sprint, where the scrum team determines what requirements will be in the upcoming iteration.
• Stage 5, during each sprint, the development team has daily meetings. In the daily meeting, you spend no more than 15 minutes and discuss what you completed yesterday, what you will work on today, and any roadblocks you have.
• Stage 6, the team holds a sprint review. In the sprint review, at the end of every sprint, you demonstrate the working product created during the sprint to the product stakeholders.
• Stage 7, the team holds a sprint retrospective. The sprint retrospective is a meeting where the team discusses how the sprint went and plans for improvements in the next sprint. Like the sprint review, you have a sprint retrospective at the end of every sprint.

In brief,An agile road-map helps you communicate your priorities in clear “what problems are we trying to solve?” terms for everyone you work with.You don’t need to know exactly what you’re working on ahead of time. It’s fine to have a fuzzy idea of what’s way out in the future and prioritize what’s coming up now.

According to the 2018 State of Agile Report, 75% of respondents adopted an agile approach within the last year, with the aim of accelerating software delivery. The results? Over 60% cited that Agile improved their time to market, project visibility, team productivity and management of changing priorities.