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

Platform as a Service and Force.com

I haven’t written much about "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) up to this point but given Salesforce.com’s growing presence the buzz generated from annual user love-in, Dreamforce, this is a good time to talk about PaaS and Salesforce.  According to this article, Gartner predicts that PaaS platforms will grow from $900 million in 2011 to $2.9 billion in 2016, representing a 26.6 percent rise each year.

Although SalesForce.com (SFDC) is best known for its customer relationship management solution delivered as a service via a cloud, force.com is SFDC’s “platform as a service” offering.  By giving their customers a foundational component for sales and also providing an environment that allows customers to add on the pieces that they need while leveraging a common user interface, authentication framework, it accelerates the potential ROI to customers (and revenue streams for SFDC).  This article will review  PaaS, touch on the advantages, and then talk a little more about why PaaS at SFDC is such a powerful combination.  

The Step Function of Cost

Building a “Private Cloud” within your data center has a lot of potential return on investment (ROI).  David Linthicom’s article, and others, are saying “you need to architect”.  

The focus needs to be on the architecture and the right-fitting enabling technology, including both private and public cloud technology, and not gratuitous opinions. There should be no limits on the technology solution patterns you can apply. If that means private, public, or a mix of both, that's fine as long as you do your requirements homework and can validate that you have chosen the right solution.

I agree, just stop architecting with brochure-ware and really think through your solution.  Think about what you need today, where you are going and how you integrate everything else.  Excluding software as a service (SaaS), when you compare private and public clouds there are some real advantages for a private cloud.  One of the biggest advantages I see public cloud solutions have, is the flexibility to scale up and down and time it takes to do that.

The thing I keep coming back to when I talk to people about public vs. private clouds is what I call “large step functions in cost”. One of the big step functions is cost to build a data center or enlarge it.  That large investments in infrastructure kills your ROI until you fully utilize that capital investment.  If you are building (or enlarging) a data center for example, most companies don’t build just what they need today, they leave some room for growth, and that’s “flexibility”.  That flexibility is costly because it just sits there on the books not really giving you any ROI until you start using it.  Really the ROI from that flexibility is only realized as future cost avoidance of the next step function in cost.  It’s like buying a restaurant and initially only serving breakfast.  Sure you’ll eventually staff up and start getting better use of that capital investment when you start serving lunch and dinner but until you do, your ROI may be negative.  Compare this to the cloud where having the capacity to grow costs you nothing.  Is “public cloud” always the best solution?  No, but you have options, architect, think, and compare.

- Chris Claborne

References & Related

• Benefits of Cloud Computing


• Challenges & Risks of Implementing Cloud Computing

How to Get Started With Cloud Computing

Some IT departments want to utilize public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) but aren’t sure how to get started.  I’ll discuss some ways to use cloud computing as you flesh out how you will use it and integrate into an existing information technology architecture.  If you’re not sure what IaaS is, read my previous article, “Exploring Amazon’s Cloud IaaS & PaaS”.

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.