Platform-as-a-service is just not dead — Red Hat exec Krishnan Subramanian says it has evolved to a stronger state.
Recently a brand new meme has started one of the cloud chatterati: the death of PaaS, or PaaS morphing into functionality for IaaS or PaaS. This discussion peaked when an analyst from 451 Research wrote a report titled “Is PaaS becoming only a feature of IaaS?” (subscription required). An example of ways others have picked up the theme appeared Jan. 14 in Network World.
In today’s fast-evolving technology world, it’s natural for pundits to jot down premature obituaries, but it also includes important to peer deeper and understand the cause of their confusion. One explanation is that PaaS has gone beyond hype and reached a brand new level of maturity. Last year, many enterprises adopted PaaS for his or her production workloads, but 2013 was also the year when the demarcation between two flavors of PaaS became clear.
Another reason is the method adopted by cloud vendors like Microsoft and Google. Both started out with PaaS but eventually started offering IaaS to compete with Amazon Web Services. Microsoft primarily has blended its offering with both PaaS- and IaaS-like features.
Two flavors of PaaS
At first, PaaS was constructed because the middle layer within the cloud stack between IaaS and SaaS to explain the evolution of application deployment platforms within the cloud. PaaS was dominated by services like Google App Engine, Heroku, and Engine Yard in those early years. Because the space matured, we saw the evolution of PaaS meeting the wishes of recent enterprises.
[For an additional perspective at the state of IaaS and PaaS, see Is The Cloud Platform Battle Over?]
Innovations by Red Hat in OpenShift, VMware (now Pivotal) in Cloud Foundry, Docker in its dotCloud platform, and others resulted in a brand new generation of PaaS offerings which are architecturally different from the primary generation. The following article, i’ll discuss the 2 flavors of PaaS.
PaaS by service orchestration
This flavor of PaaS, offered by early providers like Google App Engine, built the platform by composing different services needed for application deployment. It started with a compute fabric, on which services for data storage, monitoring, logging, etc. were added. On this flavor, PaaS is nothing but a composition of services needed for the applications to run. These were purely hosted offerings, and building and managing a platform using service orchestration was easy for providers.
PaaS by container orchestration
As PaaS matured and enterprises began to demand a personal version, another flavor developed. This was mainly because of the maturity of Linux Container technology and the feasibility of creating a platform in line with containers that can even be implemented and managed at the premises.
Docker is an ideal example of fast, lightweight Linux containers that make it easy for users to port their applications across different cloud providers. Unlike virtual machines that abstract only raw compute, containers can encapsulate entire applications and alertness environments. Vendors like Red Hat, dotCloud (now Docker), VMware (now Pivotal), and others saw value within the container-based approach: An orchestration and management layer on top of containers can offer an identical seamless developer experience because the first-generation PaaS. For progressively more vendors, container orchestration is fast becoming the norm. It is further proven by the growing interest in OpenStack’s standalone Project Solum to construct an abstraction layer for application deployment using container technology.
When you step back and think about the 2 flavors of PaaS, it is simple to grasp why some industry watchers are confused. The service orchestration-based approach of PaaS is analogous to SaaS architecturally, and the container orchestration approach of PaaS is comparable to the VM-based approach of IaaS. Though SaaS and IaaS could be extended to resemble this type of two flavors, there’s a clear value proposition for PaaS because it is defined as a separate layer within the cloud stack. Here is very true with the container orchestration flavor.
PaaS removes the complexity and prices linked to IaaS when companies like Netflix modify it right into a platform with tools atop Amazon. This approach can greatly simplify enterprise IT departments’ efforts as they transition to a more modern system.
It’s natural for similarities between platforms to cause confusion, but a premature obituary for PaaS will find yourself hurting an industry which can otherwise derive great value from ongoing development.
Krishnan Subramanian is director of OpenShift strategy at Red Hat and a frequent cloud commentator. He was formerly an analyst with Rishidot Research and a physicist.
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