Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. IBM DataPower Gateway

If you need to establish a system right away, in the past it took weeks or months to request a quote from the vendor and receive the equipment. Now, with Amazon EC2 in less than tens of minutes or hours, you can create a test environment and test it without any inconvenience.

WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.

Incentivized

• Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
• Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
• Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture

Incentivized

• The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
• DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
• The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.

Incentivized

• Sometimes, Auto scaling takes time to spin up your instances if your traffic is so high in short span of time.
• And, Auto scaling can be more efficient if we have only Load balancer in our architecture.
• It has some limitations on setting up the Auto scaling infra.

Incentivized

• The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
• IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
• Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.

Incentivized

Cost of the appliance

Incentivized

Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.

Incentivized

The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.

Incentivized

On the servers with fixed resources, Microsoft IIS was installed. In terms of storage capacity, the server has a predetermined limit. It's possible to run out of money before the next billing cycle begins. A higher price tag or more resources may be necessary to ensure everything works as expected. Oracle Compute Instance Autoscaling works like AWS once. But AWS EC2 Autoscaling has many more configuration options. AWS EC2 Automatic Scaling eliminates the need to visit the server and assess its performance physically.

• There is no need to maintain infrastructural equipment.
• There is no need to switch the electricity off or on in the case of a legitimate power outage.
• The system frequently had issues when turned on, and labor frequently continued on all night, but by transferring to the cloud, that effort might be spared.

• It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
• We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
• It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.

Incentivized