AWS & BlueMix: A Comparative Study of PaaS Cloud Service Providers

This report provides a comparative analysis of two prominent PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) cloud service providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM BlueMix. It begins by shortlisting major PaaS providers and justifying the selection of AWS for comparison against BlueMix. The report then delves into a detailed comparison of their offered services, design and navigation, and the deployment process of a 'Hello World' application on both platforms. Key aspects such as the level of complexity, ease of management, and costing models are also examined. The author's opinion on the preferred PaaS cloud service is presented before concluding that the ideal choice depends on specific user needs and priorities. Desklib provides access to this and many other solved assignments to aid in student learning.

Running head: PAAS CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER
PAAS CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Abstract:
Cloud services has emerged as one of the global preference for the management and
advancement in the technological field. However, there is complexity involved in the
selection of the service. Hence, the paper, has compared two of the cloud service provider
and determined some crucial facts that can assist a reader in the selection of the service. The
paper has been concluded by stating the no cloud service provider is perfect for all the users
and depending on the needs different cloud services can prove to be suitable for a user.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Cloud Service Providers.............................................................................................................3
Shortlisted..............................................................................................................................4
Comparison of AWS & BlueMix...............................................................................................4
Offered services.....................................................................................................................4
Design & Navigation..............................................................................................................5
‘Hello World’ app deployment..............................................................................................6
BLUEMIX............................................................................................................................12
Level of Complexity............................................................................................................18
Ease of Management............................................................................................................18
Costing model:.....................................................................................................................18
Author’s Opinion.....................................................................................................................19
Conclusion................................................................................................................................20
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................21

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Introduction
Cloud services have provided great opportunities to the developers globally. After the
introduction of Cloud PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) the developers do not have to make huge
investments or face complex issues in getting appropriate platform or tools for developing
applications (Lang, Wiesche and Krcmar 2016). However, heavy surge in the cloud service
providers have confused the end-users on the selection of the service provider. The options of
cloud service providers are vast from Amazon to Google and multiple others, all of them are
providing some unique offering to the clients (Abdelmaboud et al. 2015). Hence, the
developed report is an attempt to minimise the confusions that the developers are facing. The
discussed objective of the paper will be achieved by shortlisting most prominent PaaS
providers and selecting one of them to compare with IBM BlueMix (Lins et al. 2015). The
deployment and development process of the ‘Hello World’ of the AWS and the BlueMix has
also been provided. Finally, the author’s perception over the best PaaS cloud service after the
comparison will be provided before concluding the paper.
Cloud Service Providers
PaaS is the platform that enables the user to develop, maintain and test different
applications, O.S (operating System), networks, servers and others (Whaiduzzaman and Gani
2014). The following list offers the most prominent cloud service providers that offers PaaS
service:
 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Google App Engine Microsoft Azure IBM BlueMix Red Hat OpenShift

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 Adobe Oracle Cloud SAP Heroku
Shortlisted
AWS, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure are the market leaders of the cloud
services and most prominent of them is the AWS. Hence, AWS is selected as the co-subject
of the paper.
JUSTIFICATION 1: The selection of AWS is based on the fact that, it is the current leader in
the cloud service providers and captures over 62% of the cloud market (Novet 2018). It also
offers almost similar offerings like the Blue mix but differ in the mode of operation.
JUSTIFICATION 2: The service offered by the AWS offers huge scalability option and have
proven itself to be reliable.
Comparison of AWS & BlueMix
Both of the subjects of the paper, are global leader in technology and cloud services.
However, they differ from each other in some aspects of which the foremost id the
implementation (Wang and He 2014). While, AWS is more suitable for the professional or
corporate purposes, BlueMix is suitable for the scholarly works that includes experimentation
within the labs, academic works and others (Jiang, Ma and Wei 2016). Additionally, BlueMix
offers ease of use while, its counterpart offers flexibility (Fiaz, Guruprakash and Navaz
2017). Hence, it can be stated that both of them are offering similar services but with
different approach. The following section will attempt at getting an in-depth knowledge about
the subjects by comparing them.

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Offered services
It has been stated in the justification that both the subjects offer almost similar
services to each other. However, there is some basic difference and the following table
discusses the same:
Services offered AWS BlueMix
Internet of Things AWS offers features like
MQTT communication, HTTP
and others with the AWS IoT
SDK.
On the contrary, IBM offers
configured IoT platform.
Artificial Intelligence The AI service offered by the
AWS is comparatively weaker
than its counterparts.
IBM offers a stable AI service
to the users.
SDA (Scalable Digital
Application)
It leads in the considered
service because of its huge
scalability.
Offers limited scalability
option and hence, is lacking in
this field.
Others The services are designed for
the business and similar
applications.
They have their focus on the
scholars and students mostly.
Table 1: SERVICE COMPARISON OF THE SUBJECTS
(Source: Created by the Author)
Design & Navigation
The first thing that a user notices while using a platform or a service is its design and
navigation because it decides the comfort that the user will enjoy while using the service
(Lins, Teigeler and Sunyaev 2016). AWS has kept the vitality of design and navigation in

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mind and developed a system that offers an amazing interface (Almorsy, Grundy and Müller
2016). On the contrary, issues and bugs have been evident in the BlueMix which are related
to the interface issues, multiple logins and similar other (Zheng et al. 2016). Hence, it can be
stated that AWS leads in the discussed field and BlueMix needs some improvements in
design & navigation in order to cope up with the former.
‘Hello World’ app deployment
The discussed section will offer an insight in to deployment and development of Hello
World app by both the AWS and BlueMix. Codes from the official website of the service
providers have been attached to increase reliability from (Docs.aws.amazon.com 2018) and
(Lauren and Hadar 2015).
AWS:
Step 1: ‘Launch a Windows Server Amazon EC2 Instance’
User creates a tag key ‘Name’ and value of ‘CodeDeployDemo’.
Step 2: ‘Configure the Source Content to deploy’
The following secondary steps are involved in this step
‘Creating the web page’
1. Location allocation in system.
mkdir c:\temp\HelloWorldApp
cd c:\temp\HelloWorldApp
2. Create a index file in the allocated folder by name of ‘index.html’.
notepad index.html

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3. Add the HTML code to the file.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello, World!</title>
<style>
body {
color: #ffffff;
background-color: #0188cc;
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
font-size:14px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div align="center"><h1>Hello, World!</h1></div>
<div align="center"><h2>You have successfully deployed an application using AWS
CodeDeploy</h2></div>
<div align="center">

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<p>What to do next? Take a look through the <a
href="https://aws.amazon.com/codedeploy">AWS CodeDeploy Documentation</a>.</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
‘Creation of script to run the app’
1. Add another file named, “before-install.bat” in the same folder.
notepad before-install.bat
2. Batch Script Code is added
REM Install Internet Information Server (IIS).
c:\Windows\Sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -Command Import-Module
-Name ServerManager
c:\Windows\Sysnative\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -Command Install-
WindowsFeature Web-Server
‘Add an application specification file’:
1. Add application specification file “appspec.yml’.
notepad appspec.yml
2. Adding the YAML code to the saved file.
version: 0.0
os: windows

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files:
- source: \index.html
destination: c:\inetpub\wwwroot
hooks:
BeforeInstall:
- location: \before-install.bat
timeout: 900
Step 3: ‘Uploading the "Hello, World!" Application’
‘Provision the Amazon S3 Bucket’:
Call ‘mb’ command by name of “codedeploydemobucket” to create Amazon S3
Bucket.
aws s3 mb s3://codedeploydemobucket
Following the below mentioned step to create an ‘Amazon S3 bucket (Console)’
 Follow the link ‘https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/’
 Click on ‘Create Bucket’ and name the bucket.
 Selection of the region and click on ‘Create’ for completion of the process.
‘Permission to the Amazon-S3 Bucket and the IAM user’
{
"Statement": [
{
"Action": [
"s3:PutObject"
],
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::codedeploydemobucket/*",

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"Principal": {
"AWS": [
"111122223333"
]
}
}
]
}
‘Verification and allowance to download request’
{
"Statement": [
{
"Action": [
"s3:Get*",
"s3:List*"
],
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::codedeploydemobucket/*",
"Principal": {
"AWS": [
"arn:aws:iam::80398EXAMPLE:role/CodeDeployDemo"
]
}
}

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]
}
‘Verification of uploads’
{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[
{
"Effect":"Allow",
"Action":["s3:PutObject"],
"Resource":"arn:aws:s3:::codedeploydemobucket/*"
}
]
}
‘Prepare application file for Bucket’:
c:\
|-- temp\
|--HelloWorldApp\
|-- appspec.yml
|-- before-install.bat
|-- index.html
‘Pushing the bundled application file into a single archive’:
1. Moving back to the allotted folder “Hello World” application:
cd c:\temp\HelloWorldApp