Is PaaS only a feature of general-purpose infrastructure-as-a-service or a special layer of goods within the cloud? Experts debate the definition of PaaS at Cloud Connect.

 

In a panel on “The way forward for PaaS in an IaaS World” at Cloud Connect Summit, colocated with UBM Tech’s Interop Las Vegas, there has been a shocking amount of disagreement on how to find platform-as-a-service as a sort of cloud computing. Each member of the panel, which included several well-known cloud spokesmen, had another definition.

Mark Russinovich, a technical fellow at the Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that’s integrated with a runtime environment, rather than code this is dropped right into a virtual machine that’s sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy type of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something concerning the environment it’s running in.”

Margaret Dawson, HP’s cloud evangelist and VP of product management, claimed: “It’s really about that full environment for application development all through full, lifecycle management, even one of the orchestration stuff. It’s a couple of full environment, not just for development of the appliance. To me, it adds a layer above IaaS.”

Jesse Proudman, founder and CEO of Blue Box Group, a hosting service that, among other things, provides developer services and manages large-scale Ruby applications for patrons, said: “For me PaaS is actually concerning the service catalogue — consumable kinds of services — whether or not it’s application delivery or container service. It’s that abstraction that delivers the facility to maneuver workloads from cloud to cloud. i feel that’s the most powerful features of PaaS technology available in the market today.”

[Wish to learn more concerning the debate over the way forward for PaaS? See Cloud Crossroads: Which Way PaaS?]

Brent Smithhurst, VP of product management at ActiveState, supplier of Stackato PaaS software, said Stackato is “a platform-as-a-service in line with Cloud Foundry and our primary market is Fortune 500 enterprises who use the platform in-house, on-premises. We’ve actually tried to escape from calling it PaaS. We actually just call it an application platform.”

Krishnan Subramanian, director of Red Hat’s OpenShift platform strategy, said that, as well as Linux containerization and open source tools, “I actually have an easy definition for PaaS. The appliance scales with the platform. It scales with the infrastructure seamlessly.”

So cloud platform-as-a-service, in response to the PaaS experts, is a platform where the software knows about its environment by which it’s running. Additionally it is full application lifecycle management, from development through deployment and its production life. It is also a list of application services. It is also an “application platform” and it is a platform that may scale with the applying seamlessly. Is that clear?

Proudman listened to the definitions and inserted an extra thought: “i truly believe PaaS as a technology stack specializes in application delivery; it goes beyond just packaging up applications or services and truly must provide an entire orchestration chain to deliver those applications.” This comment makes deployment a more important section of PaaS.

Dawson also added a thought on why she continues to determine PaaS as a special cloud layer become independent from IaaS. “One reason that it doesn’t become section of IaaS is you have to manage to have application portability. If it’s just tied to at least one form of IaaS, you then would not have that portability.”

Red Hat’s Subramanian, however, disagreed. “i don’t believe it’s just application portability… It’s application portability and portability of application environments.” That’s, every thing that the applying must run — its database interface, middleware, and security policies — must become

Next Page

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

More Insights