Is the PaaS market as we know it dying? I don't think so.

I just finished reading an article by Brandon Butler titled “Is the Paas market as we know it dying?”.  I don’t think PaaS market will die but the market will change by collapsing most PaaS into IaaS portfolios but I also feel it’s still a budding market and surprises are in store.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a way to deliver an environment by which a developer can develop and deploy their applications without thinking about all of the infrastructure under that platform (servers, storage, networking, clustering, etc).  For the most part, unless the infrastructure has a direct impact to the desired outcome, a developer would rather ignore what model of blade and SAN storage is in the rack to drive the application.  Deliver enough performance and reliability and what is actually driving the platform becomes mute to a developer.  By doing this in the cloud, IT shops can outsource everything else below the line (For more, see my other PaaS article).  

As long as all of the services and tools that a developer needs are on the PaaS platform, all is well. If a critical piece is missing, you will need to move down the stack and implement the platform on top of “Infrastructure as a Service”  (IaaS) along with custom tooling.  IaaS gives the developer shop full-control but it comes at a cost.  By moving down the stack the team will need to own all of the responsibilities that comes with owning that layer.  

I think we will continue to see IaaS providers deploy PaaS or acquire others that have PaaS offerings.  It will be interesting to see what AWS does in this space.  In my opinion Elastic Beanstalk is their current solution.  Where this doesn’t fit, companies are using AWS OppsWorks as a repeatable way to deliver consistent PaaS environments do their developers.  The footprint of AWS and the myriad of additional services (message queue, database, analytics, workflow...) make it an attractive option without offering a PaaS like Heroku.    

I think the PaaS market will continue to bubble and boil.  It’s a much more turbulent environment than IaaS because of the amount of change that goes on at that layer.  Development languages, and software development tools, extensions, and development environments are changing rapidly.  If asked what I would do on a particular project it would depend on the amount of change and size.  The larger the project, the more risk that I will get into a situation that will force me to go the IaaS route.  It it’s a small, closed in project, I’ll go with pure play PaaS.

Reference

• Is the Paas market as we know it dying? - Infoworld
• Platform as a Service and Force.com - Cloudrant

-- Chris Claborne

Using Amazon Glacier

I’ve been wanting to test out Amazon Web Services (AWS) Glacier storage service since it was announced in August 2012.  If you’ve been reading my BLOG for a while, you’ll know that I am a little crazy when it comes to backing up my data.  The attraction of Amazon’s Glacier is low cost ($0.01/GB) and it’s high durability (11 9s).   I was waiting for some client side tools so that I could test (which I now have).  Windows based easy to use clients came out pretty quickly, FastGlacier was one of the first and has since seen a major release in the last month. I decided to give it a try and backup my family and client photos as well as music.  I think I have a strong use case for it and I’ve estimated that I can save $180+ per year by moving some of my archives to Glacier.  So, I’ll save some money while I’m having some fun.

Rapid Expansion of Amazon's AWS

Since I wrote my last two articles on Amazon Web Services (My intro to AWS and Using AWS), Amazon has continued to pile on capabilities into their of their infrastructure and platform cloud services.  They are rapidly building new products, data centers, and expanding capabilities in existing products.  In just three months since joining the Amazon Web Services Family, they have stuffed my mailbox full news about new product announcements, new data centers, and enhanced or expanded capabilities in existing services.  

Using Amazon’s AWS

In my last article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS), and I used AWS to describe the terms “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS).  In order to better understand the value of AWS, I deployed a real world application.  In this article, I’ll step through how I deployed and scaled my example application on AWS and comment on where I found the greatest value to be.  If you haven’t read my first AWS article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”, I suggest you read it as an introduction to AWS.

Exploring Amazon's Cloud IaaS & PaaS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a large offering of various compute and applications services that I will use for this article to help describe what “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) are.  

AWS is used by many large Internet companies like active.com, Ericsson, the guardian news, Yelp,  IMDB and others to deliver their web applications or services.  Although I’ve covered Software as a Service” and related benefits, risks, and some specific applications, this article will take the next big step into another side of cloud computing, using public scalable infrastructure to deploy your in-house applications.

My Thoughts about Amazon Web Service Failure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major failure last week and there was a lot of buz about it since it took down several major web sites. AWS is one of the leading cloud infrastructure or platform as a service companies. When they fail, it's big news.

Here’s my take.  No solution will provide 100% up-time There will always be a use-case that was not anticipated, failure mode that was not thought of, or human error that couldn’t be mitigated.  Is this a reason to call cloud computing with AWS a failure?  No.  Although I don’t know what their up-time stats are, I’m willing to bet that even if you don’t use multi-site implementation the benefits of scalability, flexibility and up-time still rival what a lot of companies could do on their own for the cost.

Amazon Ramping Their Cloud Teams

If there was any doubt about Amazon being serious about elastic cloud computing and their S3 storage service I think the recent article from Dice News will help answer that.

This week, Amazon has some 700 openings posted on Dice, primarily in Seattle. Many are in Amazon's cloud services divisions, including Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The skills most in demand are development, design, engineering and Java.

I read this as a positive trend in cloud computing growth. In summary, “game on”.

Read more about this at Dice News.