The potential and confusion of Cloudcamp founder Dave Nielsen:paas

While the potential for growth is recognised by the industry, the PAAs (Platform-service) market has been tepid for years. Why aren't PAAs popular? What problems do PAAs face? What changes do PAAs need to make?

As one of the service models of cloud computing, PAAs has a much smaller market size than the other two service modes, IAAS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service). According to a recent study by Forrester, the PAAs market was $820 million trillion in 2011, while the market size for IaaS and SaaS in the same period was 2.94 billion US dollars and 21.21 billion dollars respectively. However, in the next two years, the PAAs sector is expected to head out a steep growth curve. Forrester predicts that the PAAs market will reach $4.38 billion trillion by 2013, three times times the size of 2011.

In fact, from 2010 onwards, more and more software vendors are focusing on the PAAs domain. In the 2011, this study of PAAs became more in-depth, while more and more enterprises began to attempt to deploy PAAs based applications in the enterprise environment. Dave Nielsen, chief strategic officer of Cloud Times Technology group, spoke to reporters during his visit to China on the development of PAAs and the realistic challenges it faced. As an important researcher and catalyst in cloud computing, Nielsen is co-founder of Silicon Valley's Silicon Valley cloud computing organization Cloudcamp. Cloudcamp is a non-profit, offline community with more than 300 members who hold more than hundreds cloud computing seminars in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand each year.

Dave Nielsen, co-founder of Cloudcamp Technology group chief strategist and Silicon Valley cloud computing organization

Why aren't PAAs popular?

PAAs has inherent uniqueness compared with IaaS and SaaS, which gives it the advantage of many application deployments. For example, the operating system-independent application model created by PAAs solves the problem of system upgrade and anti-virus, and masks the complicated system management. Because the service is managed by PAAs, users do not need to establish a database, the system also has built-in backup, redundancy and other mechanisms. More to the concern, PAAs provides a more efficient application model, where multiple applications can be run on one virtual machine in the PAAs architecture, and multi-tenant mode makes the application run only when needed.

While such or such advantages abound, PAAs does not always seem to be popular. In view of this problem, Nielsen thinks, the difference of the operation mode needs to be accepted by the user is a factor. In addition, PAAs practitioners face more daunting tasks in configuration, orchestration, deployment, and versioning. "And from another perspective, PAAs developers are also facing problems that are locked by a single programming language or development framework." At the same time, the application development has no standard object and service, the data movement is also very difficult. Nielsen said.

Break the mystery with change

Over the past few years, PAAs's own technological limitations have created many obstacles to its true popularity. Today, the application of the advantage is constantly recognized, the PAAs needs to break through the changes in the ego to overcome these obstacles to reality. In Nielsen's eyes, it is now a critical period for PAAs to move towards change. "PAAs vendors should learn from past failures, not only to provide support for multiple programming languages, multiple development frameworks, but also to support existing code and extend service support." "he said.

Nielsen specifically emphasizes that the PAAs layer should be separated from IaaS, which is more beneficial to the vast majority of developers. At the same time, PAAs should support both public and private application environments, where enterprise users can develop and test in a public environment and then deploy the application in a private environment. "In addition, open source may be able to provide a more powerful driver for PAAs development, but the specific path is not yet clear." "he said.

"Over the next 3-4 years, hundreds of PAAs suppliers may emerge globally, but only 3 or 4 will survive." At the moment, force.com, Google App engine and Microsoft's Azure, a well-known PAAs provider, have only made early successes. Nielsen said. Nielsen predicts that the future development of the PAAs market may reproduce the successful trajectory of visual Basic for Applications (VBA), whose technology is embedded in each application like VBA, although the objects are different, but the platform is the same.

Nielsen also predicts that the new primary PAAs and legacy PAAs will coexist, and that the PAAs market as a whole is expected to present a "long tail" competition. "Specifically, the industry PAAs market is monopolized by large integrators, and small software developers are emerging to make longer tails in the market." Small software developers will contribute more creative inspiration to the growth of the PAAs market, but also be expected to announce the return of the Knight era! Nielsen said.

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PAAs definition

PaaS (Platform-Service) is dedicated to delivering to consumers the various applications deployed on the cloud infrastructure that can be created either by the enterprise itself or by a vendor-supported programming language and tools. Consumers do not need to manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, including networks, servers, operating systems, and storage, but they need to control the deployed applications and the possible application of the managed Environment configuration.

The PAAs vendor's mission is to provide and manage the cloud infrastructure and middleware to platform consumers and to provide platform consumers with tools for development, deployment, and management.

Note: This definition comes from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), which is still being revised with the evolution of PAAs-related technologies.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)