No Complaint

The services that AppScale does offer are at least well implemented. In my tests, I was able to use classic GUI and CLI tools (Figure 3) to make use of basic AWS services in AppScale and in AWS itself. The process of creating new instances also ran smoothly. The workstations were assigned a virtual private network and Elastic Block storage devices on demand without complaint.

Figure 3: The compatibility of the AppScale AWS API is good enough to satisfy even official tools like aws. © AppScale

However, a decision was made up front not to test the performance of the solution. Of course, my small setup within the scope of this article did not pose any problems. To be on the safe side, however, companies planning large AppScale setups would do well to contact the vendor in advance and ask to be shown benchmarks produced by environments comparable to their own intended setup.

Pricing Policy

From a technical point of view, AppScale can be used to build a well-functioning local AWS clone, but what are the company's business and pricing policies? The most attractive platform becomes worthless if it consumes vast sums of money for licenses and subscriptions. I can sound the all-clear at this point: AppScale not only offers fixed rates, it also ensures transparency.

Potential AppScale customers have the choice between fully in-house operation of the software on their own infrastructure or outsourcing operations to an AppScale partner, which is basically a special form of hybrid cloud. The resulting platform is private, but the user company doesn't have to worry about running it. This service is taken care of by a provider commissioned by the manufacturer. However, it is hard to quote fixed rates for this use case, because they will depend strongly on the scale of the setup.

If you want to run AppScale in your own data center and without external help, contracts of three, five, or seven years are available, with longer terms offering you greater discounts. Important from the manufacturer's point of view is that contracts are offered at fixed prices that are not based on usage or throughput.

AppScale does not quote concrete prices on its website [2], but you can find hints online of a price per node for the self-hosted variant in the range of EUR40/month. If you are running a fairly large private cloud (e.g., 200 compute nodes), you can expect to pay around EUR8,000/month for the software. Depending on the setting, this could be significantly cheaper than moving operations completely to the public cloud.

Conclusions

Eucalyptus has risen like a phoenix from the HP ashes and is making a comeback as AppScale. The manufacturer shows that it has its product strategy under control by the option of operating AppScale as a private cloud, but having it hosted by a provider specifically for your own requirements. In this way, companies get the best of both worlds. Nobody is forcing you to run your own IT infrastructure, but you can still benefit from a private cloud with AWS compatibility.

The approach of running AppScale entirely by yourself seems less convincing. This option is probably only really worthwhile for companies that have already invested massively in the AWS APIs but now want to roll back toward a private cloud. Pricing-wise, the switch is worth it – especially if the cost of API calls and transit traffic make up the bulk of your AWS bill.

Technically, AppScale is cutting edge, and the AWS compatibility provided is likely to be fine for most use cases. That said, it might worry you that many AWS services are not available in an AppScale cloud. Of course, no one can really expect that, because the AppScale team does not have the levels of resources at its disposal like AWS.

The Author

Freelance journalist Martin Gerhard Loschwitz focuses primarily on topics such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Chef.