UC San Diego

Cloud platforms are emerging with great potential to support developers to develop and deploy applications in the cloud. This thesis aims at getting a glimpse of this potential, by conducting a survey on several typical cloud platforms from the perspective of a developer. We found that Amazon Web Services is a very general environment that can support various types of applications, although the generality comes with minimum support for the development process; there are opportunities for third- party add-on frameworks that compensate this shortcoming in specific application categories, with Hadoop being an example in the area of distributed/parallel computing. Sun Grid Compute Utility proposes an attractive model for batch processing programs, but the service needs significant improvement to be a strong competitor. Google App Engine is a promising platform for web applications, hiding inside appropriately designed features aiming at high scalability and throughput. Microsoft Windows Azure, although at the high level provides roughly similar offerings as a general environment, consists of a very impressive and solid foundation, and promises to become a strong player in the landscape.