PaaS or Platform as a Service is described by Wikipedia as:
“… the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet —with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users.”
In other words, a faster (shared collaboration, more access to resources, web services), cheaper (pay-as-you-go), better way to build apps using cloud computing. With multiple options now available from the big players, such as Google’s App Engine, Force.com from salesforce.com, Microsoft’s Azure and smaller players such as Wolf Frameworks and more being added by the day, deciding whether to transition from a “traditional” method of software development to PaaS is a quandary which will confront every software development shop. There have been several posts comparing PaaS offerings. An interesting post from Zdnet blog last year produced a head-to-head comparison of Google App Engine to Amazon’s offerings even though Amazon is now more recognized as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) rather than a PaaS.
As with all cloud topics these days, there is more than enough information and debate available to make you be a fan of one side or the other, all within the space of a single article or post. But let’s take a position that PaaS is here to stay, what next? This blog post from Wolf Frameworks is a nice overview of PaaS considerations, naturally slanted towards Wolf’s capabilities, but a good overview nonetheless. Another interesting article on ebizq.net poses the question of migration standards
One of the challenges of PaaS was said to be vendor lock, Dharmesh Shah, entrepreneur, author of one of my favorite blogs onstartups.com had this to say about Force.com when it was first launched back in late 2007. While the fear is/was well founded, I am seeing and hearing of more and more companies combining best of breed elements of specific platforms in order to define and develop their offerings for the cloud.
James Staten of Forrester observed at the SDForum conference in April 09, “… major software developers need to start building for the cloud and revamping their legacy apps … Eating your young” is an oft used term to indicate cannibalization of older product lines for those with grander future potential. Whether or not it is necessary to use PaaS to get there is the question. For those companies that want to “dip their toe” into the cloud but not use PaaS to create new or completely re-author their offerings, there are products and services out there such as Cloud Foundry that will make the move more painless than full blown PaaS.
So PaaS or fail? Not an easy decision. It will be very interesting to see how it all plays out over the next few years. As David Chappell said during this cloud-platforms-today-a-perspective presentation at the SDForum conference “Cloud Platforms are the 6th major wave in 50 years of computing. It’s a great time to be building applications.”