Platform-as-Service (PaaS) – A Growing Cloud Solution

A recent article in SD Times highlights insights from Ben Grubin of Boston-based Cloud Technology Partners who talks about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), their link to the cloud, enterprise adoption and concerns IT professionals may have with this developing technology. The article is quick to point out that PaaS is still “in its infancy” with an explosion in adoption a few years out still, but as it has been linked to the cloud so much it has a sense of maturity. So where does PaaS truly stand and what are some concerns Grubin says that the enterprise faces? Here is a quick rundown on the article.

The article states that there is currently a sense of confusion when it comes to PaaS. There are also fears of security and vendor lock in that arise with PaaS and the limited options in services that we have seen until recently. “PaaS confuses people and fills them with fear of vendor lock-in because the early platforms are tied to specific infrastructures. The overwhelming majority of people using the Force.com platform, for instance, are those working with Salesforce’s CRM system.”

For a PaaS to become truly successful and help ease some of these initial concerns Grubin points to the example of what the .NET Framework is to C#. “You can write the code yourself in C#, or you can take advantage of the broader framework, with the ability to reuse software components between apps and to integrate with outside resources and services. ‘It becomes a migration target more than what Force.com was,’ he said. “There’s no ‘Write your app for MY platform.’ ” This idea utilizing components across different platform/framework/application and the standardization of platforms is what will really drive adoption and the explosion of PaaS. He points to Amazon Web Services as an example of a provider executing this strategy “perfectly”.

This standardization in platforms would ultimately allow users to move applications from one PaaS to another without major overhaul on the application helping to quell some of the vendor lock in worry. Of which, until recently, the only cure to such fear has been the private cloud, but that does not scale.

Click here to read the full piece and for further insight into the state of PaaS included, what Grubin says, is a focus on data center consolidation rather than cloud adoption at the moment.