Software as a service Archives

Updated June 28, 2019

In a recent post I looked into putting phpBB in the cloud, the first in a series of related posts. In the first post I said that while it is possible to do it, phpBB is not a cloud-first software solution. There are advantages to putting phpBB in the cloud, such as scalability and potentially lower costs. But there are significant drawbacks for most forum administrators too, including almost no technical support and you must provide any system administration.

Cloud service are arranged around various service types. While the types can be breathtaking at times (look at Amazon’s many specialized web services) you can sort of lasso these into three types: IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service), PAAS (Platform as a Service) and SAAS (Software as a Service). As you will see, phpBB doesn’t fit neatly into any of these models.

IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service)

With IAAS, the cloud provider provides you with a set of basic tools and lets you have at it. The tools can be refined somewhat but generally you get an operating system (usually some variant of Linux), a web server (generally Apache) and a database (generally mySQL). The actual set of tools that you get depends on the package you select. In Amazon Web Services speak, this is the AMI (Amazon Machine Instance). Yes, there are AMIs for phpBB such as intuz’s and BitNami’s. However, these packages are not necessarily free. BitNami, for example, creates a “smart” integration of these tools along with other ones that are optimized for various cloud deployment patterns. You will probably be asked to pay for the privilege. A good package though it well thought out and cleverly integrated for maximum functionality and performance, and these phpBB AMIs should be finely tuned for phpBB. You might want to use one of these packages for an upfront cost and then rent it for a monthly fee.

Some packages/AMIs are free and come from a common library provided by the cloud vendor. You might want to install one of these instead. They likely won’t come as well integrated, but they will get the job done.

As much as an intelligent package/AMI helps, you still don’t get much in the way of handholding. You will generally get the most basic of control panels provided by the cloud provider and some SSH and database credentials. You are expected to know how to use SSH, FTP and relational databases. Of course as time goes on, your operating system, web server and database software will need updating. Generally, operating system and security upgrades are handled for you in the background. But you may be expected to figure out how to do this by yourself, so make sure you understand what will and won’t be done for you. It’s hard to escape doing some of your work using SSH and the Unix prompt.

If none of this intimidates you, IAAS is a great choice and probably cheaper than using a web host. But basically you are trading your own time and expertise to lower hosting costs, but as a bonus you should get a scalable cloud service to handle high and low demand periods, that is if you set it up right. There is an art to fine-tuning cloud service as you need to balance between potential high usage spikes and your budget.

PAAS (Platform as a Service)

In general, PAAS cloud services are oriented around developers. If you want to be the next Facebook, for example, PAAS will provide you not just with infrastructure as a service but also a set of development tools finely optimized for you to develop unique cloud services. They tend to be oriented around one or more programming languages, such as Java or PHP, and one or more deployment engines, such as Kubernetes. The nice thing about PAAS is that you don’t manage much. Should the Java J2EE engine need an update, that will be handled for you. Consequently, PAAS tends to cost more than IAAS. You and your development team are then free to focus on developing that next Facebook.

phpBB of course is a prepackaged software solution. You shouldn’t be developing anything, unless perhaps you are an extension developer like me. But if you are an extension developer like me, you don’t need to develop your extension using PAAS because phpBB is not typically deployed in the cloud. Instead, you have a local web development environment and do your development there. You might want to test it on a web server connected to the Internet, but you don’t need PAAS to do that.

So basically, using the PAAS cloud service type for phpBB makes no sense.

SAAS (Software as a Service)

In the SAAS model, you use a cloud provider to provide a software solution in the cloud. Perhaps the best known SAAS provider is Office 365. Why install Microsoft Office on a PC when you can run it as a cloud service instead? It’s a popular model that is making some companies like Adobe (and its Adobe Creative Suite) or Salesforce.com tons of money. They’ve already figured out an optimal solution and they are happy to rent it to you for a fixed cost per month. If you don’t need it anymore, you cancel your contract. In some cases, you do actually download some software on your PC that works optimally with these services in the cloud. Many developers using PAAS are actually hoping to market their solutions as SAAS. Since SAAS is deployed in the cloud, it is presumably finely engineered for optimal performance in all kinds of workloads.

The thing is, you can sort of get phpBB as SAAS already. phpBB has a knowledge base article on how to do it with Microsoft Azure. There are also a number of sites that allow you to create phpBB forums on their servers, which are often for free for low usage sites, sort of how you can host a blog on wordpress.com for free under a subdomain like myblog.wordpress.com. And if you have web hosting already, there is usually a scripting center that allows you to install phpBB. But are these really providing software as a service? They arguably don’t because once you install phpBB you generally don’t want to use it “out of the box”. You want to change the style, or add extensions, or do all sort of fine-tuning. If you don’t need to do these things, then maybe these “SAAS” services are what you need. They just aren’t really SAAS, since you can’t give your site this degree of customization, because there is no way to do this other than to use phpBB. And if you use phpBB you will need to be able to upload and edit files on your phpBB instance.

Conclusion

With a better understanding of the cloud service types, you should now understand why phpBB is so rarely placed in the cloud. At its root, it’s because phpBB is not a cloud-first product, and probably never will be. In a future post, I’ll look into deploying phpBB using IAAS to give you some idea of what you might be getting into.

So I’ve been playing with cloud providers, most recently looking at the Google Cloud in context with a WordPress group that I belong to. But over the years I’ve also studied Amazon Web Services, the original cloud provider. There are other cloud providers but really the only other major player is Microsoft Azure. Host on another cloud and you may find out that it won’t last in the long term, or is not a real cloud service. My goal is to eventually demonstrate how to run phpBB in the cloud, starting with the Google Cloud that I am currently exploring, and bring you along for the ride.

Characteristics of cloud services

There are lots of definitions of cloud services and cloud computing. From the perspective of someone who owns and manages a forum, all you probably really want to know about it what makes these services different than your typical web host like Siteground or GoDaddy. You will get lots of answers. Last year I helped move a big forum to Amazon’s EC2 cloud service. I got some preliminary answer from that work. Some differences:

Cloud services are scalable. If you have a host like GoDaddy and you outgrow the resources you are allowed to use inside the scope of your contract, you will get a little leeway. But generally you will be asked to move up to a higher class of hosting. This contrasts with cloud services. Its architecture lets your site grow seamlessly, at least if you set it up right, scaling up by a factor of 100 or more as needed, and maybe dropping back down after demand eases. So if you expect to have a forum that will get suddenly very, very popular, hosting with a cloud service should be a big selling point. Whereas, moving to a higher class of hosting at GoDaddy is potentially a lot of hassle.
You don’t get handholding with cloud services. Don’t expect to have a support hotline or a phone number that you can call to reach someone to help you struggle with technical issues. You either brings these skills with you or pay someone to leverage them for you.
Cloud services are not for cheapskates. It’s not that cloud services are inherently more expensive than traditional hosts. In many cases, cloud hosting is the better buy because you pay for what you use. Cloud services are elastic to scale on demand, so sometimes your costs will go way up for a given month. That’s because you are getting a lot more traffic or are using a lot more space or require additional virtual CPUs. Very tech savvy people who have small sites might be able to host for free in “micro instances” of these cloud services. Here’s a video that shows how a tech savvy person can spin up a site on a cloud service for less than a dollar a month, providing you know your site’s usage will be minimal. But you really have to know what you are doing.

Why to not use a cloud service

You’re not a techie and want to stay that way. If you are paying $20 a month to Siteground, for example, it will seem like a rip off if you can do the same thing for $1 a month on the Google Cloud and it fits in a micro instance. But in most cases, it’s not. With web hosts, someone else is managing the infrastructure, providing 24/7 support and they provide a host of tools like cPanel to easily do things like manage files, create backups and create email addresses. You are free to concentrate more on what matters: your site and its content, and leave the heavy lifting to a company which is probably doing it for hundreds of people using the same machine you are. Someone else worries about security patches, system upgrades and site vulnerabilities. Yes, often if you manage a phpBB forum, you do have to put your hands into the soil, so to speak. You might have to create email addresses or tweak something in a database, generally in a control panel like cPanel or Plesk. But that’s a whole lot easier than trying to upgrade a Linux kernel or managing an email server’s firewall rules.
You prefer fixed costs. You don’t like surprises, particularly financial surprises. With a contract and a good web host, you know what you are paying for, for how long, and what you can expect while you host with the provider.
You don’t need to worry about your site getting quickly popular. Your forum is not the next Instagram. It may grow some during the year and there may be some spikes in traffic here and there, but it’s manageable.
You like having tech support on speed dial. Hosts of course vary in the quality of the technical support they provide, but knowing you can call a technical person on the phone or chat with them online about some weird problem you are having is comforting.

With phpBB in particular, while it can be made to work in the cloud, it is not a cloud-first product. In truth, cloud-services are mostly for developers and large organizations. Generally they want the reliability and high “up time” that cloud services provide. Organizations use cloud services to mitigate their risks and lower costs; maintaining their own servers and technical support staff is expensive. Most of these organizations though do have developers. They are writing or maintaining systems or services to handle lots of needs, and most of these are proprietary, not using off the shelf software like phpBB. The exception is the Software as a Service model. Some companies like salesforce.com offer their solutions as services you can rent, and put their services in either a public or a private cloud of their own.

In my next post, I’ll look at the other two models cloud services offer, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service and explain why neither is a great match for phpBB. That said, sometimes you might want to put phpBB on one of these service types anyhow. We’ll explore why and the tradeoffs involved.