Navigating the Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market Swamp
PaaS (Platform as a Service) has been called both a revolutionary tool that enables developers to build true cloud applications and a leap of faith. Only a year ago, Cloud Foundry was declared the winner of the PaaS standards wars; recently it was declared a potential dead end. So is PaaS something that a company can really leverage to build new cloud applications quickly and easily, or is it just another expensive software development methodology that developers ignore?
A typical large enterprise has 3,000-5,000 applications to manage across their IT portfolio on top of a tangle of systems and infrastructure. The applications could be in the public cloud, on legacy hardware, on a private cloud, or some mix of all of the above. As a result, IT application portfolio management is often seen as a costly nightmare.
The promise is that PaaS environments and tools will be used to rationalize a company’s IT portfolios by quickly identifying the applications that are making the most impact and reducing the cost of maintaining legacy systems that are no longer returning value.
The use of PaaS to develop applications directly in the cloud by enterprise development teams has been held back due to the lack of good cloud development tools and comprehensive, feature-rich suites needed to support an enterprise cloud portfolio. The original PaaS tools were designed to develop native cloud applications and had narrow but well-defined feature sets.
Enterprises that have long enjoyed the more sophisticated traditional development environments have been reluctant to migrate to new tools unless and until they are proven to be better than—or at least equal to—their already familiar excellent tools.
In response to the lackluster enterprise response to early PaaS tools, vendors have been rapidly adding capabilities. PaaS environments now provide rich development environments, manage the production environment, deliver brokerage services, administer cloud services, orchestrate across hybrid clouds, and support the entire software development lifecycle, while whipping up batches of cookies in their spare cycles.
While merging all these functions might seem appealing, each additional somewhat related feature makes the tool that much more difficult to deploy, more complex to use, and of course, more costly to buy.
PaaS has come a long way in the past three years. Currently available PaaS offerings have plenty of features that will appeal to any developer working in a cloud environment, but watch out for a bad case of feature creep.
PaaS still has a ways to go before it becomes a standard platform for the application development and production management processes in most companies. Future PaaS tools will need to be easier to deploy, more intuitive to use, and have the features needed to build applications across internal and public cloud environments.
