Paas is a natural product after SOA and SaaS

I have previously written a post about Amazon Web Services (AWS), which should be the first large-scale attempt on the Web 2.0/SOA Infrastructure Leasing Market. Not long ago, in an interview with Microsoft's Internet service bus, a small-scale attempt provided to developers.

I have basically enjoyed AWS and its potential markets. Since AWS launched S3, SQS, and EC2, many interesting value-added applications have emerged, for example, some people use it to construct a new generation of B2B/EDI van. Doug Kaye is talking about how to use AWS's infrastructure to design the architecture of the gigavox podcast platform. In the podcast discussion, Kaye not only explains how to make good use of Amazon's rented Data Service S3, intermediary Message Service SQS, but also the virtualization platform EC2 built on xen, in addition to designing his application architecture, he also talked about the various restrictions encountered as an early adopter and how to overcome them. It also provided a reference for Amazon's future improvements to AWS. Not surprisingly, just like all software, this kind of software services that are directly rented through the network is still very early, and of course there is still a lot of room for further improvement. Such cases are very helpful for us to have a more objective understanding of the completeness and maturity of such services.

From the perspective of investment/management, AWS is indeed a bold attempt, So I once described it as a "bet. Based on its recent financial report, we can only mention the AWS operation situation with hundreds of thousands of registered developers, and the database has stored hundreds of millions of objects, however, I do not dare to mention the actual profit or loss. This is just like the news group of Murdoch who bought MySpace. But now, in the entire group's financial report, MySpace can only be implicitly included in the "other miscellaneous income", which accounts for a very small proportion, almost all others come from their own business (traditional media) revenue. But then again, many shopping malls, one of them, rely on not just fast, accurate, and aggressive bold investment? In history, many of the commercial models of daihatli city were mistaken.

Let's not talk about the meaning of this new model. the leasing of this service infrastructure can be considered after SOA and SaaS (software as a service, next natural evolution-when applications (CRM, SFA,...) on the top of the stack ,...) after being serviced and rented out (SAAS), the lower-level service infrastructure is followed. Currently, salesforce.com is a powerful force.com platform (formerly known as salesforce SOA and apex). It is the best example. Recently, it has launched a new saying "Platform as a service" (PAAs. SAAS has already been discussed by many media. sap has recently announced its formal entry into this market, making it even more lively. The PAAs can be said to further lease the following features supporting applications from middleware to databases and virtualized OS environments through the network, remote development, configuration, and deployment through the network, and then directly run in the computing center of the vendor that provides the hosting service.

Salesforce.com claims that customers not only use their force.com platform for MashUps, but also integrate Web Services for Google map Web 2.0 websites, it is used to successfully integrate SAP applications in the enterprise firewall. When the it of the enterprises that rent SaaS have a deeper understanding and understanding of the concept and practical experience of "service, naturally, it will promote the service of more non-rental and self-maintained systems in enterprises. Therefore, the emergence of SaaS and Paas is a very positive development of SOA. It is conceivable that the vast majority of enterprises that adopt the PAAs model in advance will be existing SaaS customers, they have concerns about the reliability, scalability, and performance of rasp, such as remote operations and management over the network, as well as issues related to lease contracts, they all have great confidence and good grasp. Furthermore, because they already have an important system (CRM, SFA, PLM) That is rented from people in Saas mode, it is natural that they will gradually have various business needs, we need to integrate these external SaaS applications with other internal business applications, such as ERP. At this time, the PAAs industry will lobby: instead of spending your own time purchasing, learning, and managing the entire SOA infrastructure, why not rent it from us, anyway, one of the main objects you want to integrate-your {CRM | SFA | PLM} system is now running in my center, is it similar to renting my integration platform to remotely integrate your ERP with {CRM | SFA | PLM} remotely from your internal network integration platform? In addition, you used our development toolbox when you rented my {CRM | SFA | PLM}. You are familiar with our development and configuration environments, now, you can quickly use my integrated platform without learning new languages and tools. Why not?

From an academic point of view, if we take the SOA layered architecture (reference architecture) that we often talk about, the various components in the stack:

　　

Compared with the force.com architecture (as shown below), we will find many interesting similarities. At least conceptually, the XXX in "XXX as a service" includes the presentation layer, integration layer, and data service layer functions provided by typical SOA middleware. Of course, the degree to which its functionality can be achieved remains to be tested. However, due to the differences between the pattern and the design goal, coupled with the fact that it is still in a very early stage, we don't have to expect it to have portals, ESB, Integration Server, the data service platform is so rich and powerful-in fact, it may happen to be the opposite-AWS S3 and SQS are a good example, because they must be highly loosely coupled in their innate design; compared with traditional middleware, "minimalism" has become their main selling point and value. This is S3, and SQS wants to emphasize the feature of simple (of course, in comparison with force.com, it will be much more tightly coupled than AWS, and it will be bound to its existing application platform to a considerable extent, because its current main customer target is for customers who lease its CRM applications, is not as general as AWS ). In addition, in comparison, we can see that force.com is still missing the business process service (BPM) layer, and the ESB has not yet appeared, but the intergration-as-a-service layer is extended, discussions about adding the ESB feature have emerged.