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Is PaaS Dead? Engine Yard Weighs in With Latest eBook

Is PaaS Dead? Engine Yard Weighs in With Latest eBook

Is PaaS Dead? Engine Yard Weighs in With Latest eBook

Engine Yard, a leading provider of support services for Ruby on Rails applications, has boldly asked the question, “Is PaaS Dead?” They go over this in their latest eBook, “PaaS is Dead: The Digital Evolution of a ‘Dying’ Platform.” The eBook goes into the history of PaaS, its flaws, and where it is heading.

This eBook is in response to many claims that PaaS is dead. Engine Yard doesn’t agree and uses specific arguments and examples to illustrate that this is an exaggerated claim.


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They state, “As with most technologies, PaaS is changing. Its popularity seems to have been waning according to some sources- especially among enterprise developers – and some companies are finding that PaaS may not always be the right fit for their expanding business application… However, the infrastructure services offered by PaaS are proving ideal for DevOps, providing a deployment platform where developers and IT engineers can come together to rapidly develop, deploy, and test applications.”

Is PaaS Dead?

One significant problem with PaaS is reliance on a platform provider. This can be fine if you don’t need more than a platform offers, but you’re limited in a lot of regards. Some older PaaS platform providers have trouble supporting web, e-commerce, and mobile applications. This is problematic for many companies.

Many IT teams may want to customize their deployment infrastructure, so PaaS is not the option for them. There is almost no flexibility in PaaS deployment. With technological advancements coming faster than ever, having flexibility is important to a lot of companies. You will need your PaaS provider to move faster than you do, or else you’ll hit an advancement roadblock.

Companies interested in PaaS are concerned about obsolescence. Having infrastructural reliance on a provider means that the provider can make decisions for you. For example, a PaaS provider can abandon a programming language or development tool. If something like this happens and you want to change providers, it can be difficult to migrate your apps and data to the new provider.

PaaS isn’t dead?

It’s clear in the eBook that Engine Yard has a focus on DevOps. They recognize the benefits of IaaS (infrastructure as a service), but also believe there’s still a place for PaaS. For DevOps, PaaS is an optimized platform ready to install and test applications. Users can focus on creating applications, rather than maintaining computing infrastructure. It’s one less headache for IT teams to deal with.

Engine Yard states, “In any DevOps pipeline, each of the core components needs to be delivered as a hosted service to provide a complete solution… The fewer services you have to create and manage yourself, the easier it is to create, deploy, and test applications in a shorter period.”

Speed is what drives DevOps. Engine Yard believes that speed and simplicity are the primary aspects of PaaS, so it makes sense that DevOps would benefit. Collaboration would also be simplified due to virtual machines being provided in the platform. Building cloud applications would be faster due to existing programming languages and APIs. Collaboration leads to increased speed, and PaaS makes easier development, deployment, and testing.

We encourage you to read the full eBook here.

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