Five types of open source PAAs scenarios you should know

Open source Platform as a service (PaaS) allows developers and users to contribute and share source code and extensions. Some PAAs is driven by the vendor, while others are based on standards.

The vendor-driven open source PAAs allows developers and users to be locked in by a single vendor. When it comes to transferring applications from vendor-driven open-source platforms to another platform, developers have limited control over this.

Standards-based open platforms are not vendor-independent and flexible; it is designed to standardize the orchestration of automated processes for lifecycle management. Developers can deliver applications across the cloud.

Let's take a look at five popular open source platforms. Please note: Not all of these platforms work in tandem with OpenStack.

Vendor-driven open source PAAs

Cloud Foundry(formerly developed by VMware) obtains source code from a broad range of ruby developers and users. This open source PAAs allows people to deploy information systems to OpenStack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VSphere, VCloud Air, and VCloud Director. The hosting services provided by Cloud Foundry include: MySQL (which can be used to develop SaaS applications), MongoDB (a NoSQL database), and RABBITMQ (the message broker that connects applications asynchronously). To simplify tasks, PAAs developers have access to tools such as command-line tools, Eclipse plug-ins, build consolidation tools, and application extension tools. The platform that competes with cloud Foundry is also Appscale, Heroku, OpenShift and Google App engine (Google Apps). Note: December 9, 2014, the Cloud Foundry Foundation announces that it will be managed as a Linux Foundation collaboration project.

OpenShift(Red Hat) runs in the private Cloud (OpenShift Enterprise), Public Cloud (OpenShift Online), and the upstream community (through the OpenShift Origin project). OpenShift hosts other databases that run MySQL and mongodb;openshift support, including PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL. This open source PAAs runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and provides you with a set of customer (command) toolsets. You can use JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java. The OpenShift runs on OpenStack.

Stackato(activestate) is a PAAs based on the cloud foundry. Instead of contributing source code, you can choose Open source projects from the Stackato App Store. You can browse through a wide range of open source projects written in various languages and frameworks. For quick deployment, you just click on an item.

If you're curious, you can look at the source code of a project and see how it's built. You can decide whether to customize the project or use your own application.

There are three versions of Stackato available:

• Stackato Micro Cloud: Suppose you want to deploy the application to a desktop virtual machine, or try the Micro cloud on Amazon EC2 Sandbox. You are limited to 4 GB of memory, single node, and community-based support.
• Stackato Cluster: Suppose you're the head of a small team, want to build a small cluster, deploy the application to your infrastructure or public cloud. You are limited to a few gigabytes of memory and community-based support. You can have as many nodes as you want.
• Stackato Enterprise: Suppose your business wants to deploy applications to hypervisors or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) while leveraging the benefits of automatic scaling. It provides configuration and production support with service level agreements (SLAs) as a guarantee.

You can use Stackato in conjunction with OpenStack, VSphere, CloudStack, XenServer, KVM, HP Cloud Services, and AWS.

In June 2013,Apache Stratos(donated by WSO2) donated to Apache as an open source PAAs. It works in tandem with many application servers, databases, languages, and even legacy systems. You can set up partitions to control IaaS resources. WSO2 App Factory can help you accelerate life cycle iterations on your PAAs.

Contributors to this platform include developers from SuSE, Cisco, Citrix, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), SunGard and engine yard. You can use Stratos in conjunction with AWS, OpenStack, and Vcloud.

Standard-based, open source PAAs

cloudify(gigaspaces) is based on the draft version of the Oasis TOSCA (Cloud Application topology and orchestration specification). The technical Committee of this vendor-agnostic standard was established in 2012. The initiators of the standard include the Crown group, IBM, NetApp, Red Hat and SAP.

This standard does not rely on any one vendor's technology (such as hypervisor virtualization) to run the open source PAAs, which describes the application's topology as the basis of the workflow, which in turn acts as the basic building block for the policy.

This standard can handle critical errors that developers make when they manually perform the following tasks:

• Set up monitoring alerts;
• Execute deployment strategy;
• Collect and analyze logs;
• Measure performance against service availability assurance in SLAs.

To eliminate human intervention, the standard is designed to help PAAs developers automate the lifecycle, including deployment, scaling, patching, monitoring, and remediation across the cloud. Build and use a library of cloud service modules that developers can use to automate.

You can use PAAs to test how smoothly your automation and orchestration processes are performing. Cloudify can automate deployment on OpenStack, AWS, CloudStack, Microsoft Azure, and VMware.

Conclusion

If you want to contribute and share the source code, you can choose an open source PAAs. It's important to see if it's cost-effectively working with OpenStack or other IaaS clouds.

Five types of open source PAAs scenarios you should know