IaaS infringes on acceptance of true PaaS cloud architecture

Organizations that have chosen true Platform as a Service have done so because it can deliver production applications for a small fraction of the cost and manpower of doing it themselves -- on-premises or on IaaS, they say. But a PaaS cloud architecture is still encountering enterprise hesitance.

Choose Digital in Miami offers a digital marketplace platform that customers white-label as part of loyalty and affinity programs. When the company was founded three years ago, it evaluated some early PaaS options, and found that CloudBees integrated tightly with its continuous integration tools, including Jenkins test and the GitHub source repository, and enabled the firm to get its products up and running very quickly.

“PaaS gave us the flexibility to be very nimble as a team, to prototype quickly -- and to throw stuff away if it didn’t work,” said Mario Cruz, Choose Digital’s CTO and cofounder. It meant the company didn’t need to hire dedicated infrastructure and operations staff, and instead could focus on hiring developers.

“It’s like having a whole infrastructure team in-house, without actually having an infrastructure team,” Cruz said. Without CloudBees, he estimates that he would have had to hire eight infrastructure engineers to support the 30 applications running on the platform.

Indeed, Platform as a Service has good uptake among development organizations that need super-fast time to market, said Matt Soldo, senior director of product management at Heroku. A typical customer is a marketing or media firm that needs to stand up a highly scalable Web or mobile application quickly, in response to an upcoming sponsorship opportunity, for example. Soldo said some customers have chosen Heroku for marketing campaigns running during high-profile sporting events like the Super Bowl and New York Marathon because applications running there can scale easily.

Those apps are time-sensitive, and require “a lot of upfront capacity planning in terms of traffic simulation,” Soldo said.

A PaaS cloud architecture is a logical choice for a technology-focused startup, but Choose Digital’s Cruz said enterprises can and should implement PaaS. “You don’t need to put everything there, but you want to put 100% of your development on PaaS,” he said, including testing, staging and quality assurance. “Once you’re there, there’s no turning back.”

Not surprisingly, PaaS providers say their platforms are a good fit for most types of applications.

“80% of what you build will run better on PaaS -- maybe even 95%,” said Sacha Labourey, CEO at CloudBees. That’s because the platform itself is built according to exacting best practices, and thus all apps running on top of it benefit. In contrast, most IT shops cannot honestly lay claim to providing a bullet-proof infrastructure layer.

“Unless you’re JP Morgan, the chances are that your best practices are actually just average practices,” Labourey said.

Specifically, Forrester’s Staten said PaaS is a particularly good fit for some mobile apps and business process workflows, such as filling out forms.

“These are lightweight applications that don’t require a lot of complex programming, and they use a lot of reusable components,” he said.

IT operations teams, meanwhile, benefit from their developers having access to a PaaS because it presents a single unified environment that spans development, testing, staging and production, said Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState, which offers a PaaS platform called Stackato that’s based on the open source Cloud Foundry.

Today, developers develop code on a desktop, and then pass it along to testing. But the services that the developer may have used initially may or may not be present in the testing environment, or in staging and production further down the road, he said. “There can be a lot of back and forth,” he said.

With PaaS, each member of the team has access to the same underlying services, which streamlines application development processes and minimizes the amount of time the operations team spends building and rebuilding various development environments.

“There are a lot of stories about IT and developers butting heads,” Copeland said. But with PaaS, “there’s more collaboration because IT is freed up.”