Motif Markets are very experienced with hosting in cloud environments. We know it, prefer it and recommend it.

We have deployed our systems to both Amazon AWS and are very familiar with these environments. The paradigms used in these cloud environments are very similar and most likely other cloud environments would use similar paradigms. Accordingly, we would be comfortable deploying to any cloud providers.

With cloud, your upfront capital requirements are largely removed and your need for inhouse IT resources is greatly reduced. Services such as server instances (EC2/ECS) allow new servers to be started and no hardware maintainance is required to keep them runnning.

These services are also very reliable - but not 100%. Fortunately cloud providers have many features to assist with redundancy and scaling. This includes having more than one hosting facility in a region. Hosted applications, can take advantage of these multiple hosting facilities to ensure that they keep working even with the failure of a complete hosting facility.

Analagous networking services, similar to what you would use in an on-premise environment, are available. Services such as LAN, DNS, Directory, routing, VPN, external connectivity etc can be configured to provide a similar set up as you would organise in an on-premise environment.

Also many software systems are available as services. For example, relational databases are available as a service. You do not have to install the database software on a server. Simply start an instance of a database service and then you can connect to it and begin using it. There is a very large number of such services available with different options for these services. For example, relational database services can be started with high availability (redundancy) either off or on.

The big danger with with cloud providers is managing costs. It is so easy to (for example) spin up new servers and suddenly find your monthly bills have increased to unexpected high levels. Some cloud providers will even provide services on credit. If this is not carefully managed, the bills further on down the track can be confronting. Discipline and understanding are important when using these services.

Motif Markets have the inhouse skills to effectively use hosting in cloud environments. We can assist customers with getting the best setup for our products in any of the cloud providers.