Cloud computing begins an enterprise-level campaign

The Battle of cloud Computing in the enterprise market has begun: new cloud service providers such as AWS have moved the cheese of traditional it giants in the corporate market, and traditional giants have struggled to fight back. With the advent of traditional it giants, PAAs markets have become more cluttered than ever before. The only definite consensus seems to be one: everyone likes the word "platform/platform," because the word "platform" has unlimited imagination.

More and more people are beginning to talk and focus on PAAs, including operators, internet giants, traditional it vendors, consultants and integrators, ISVs, it technology media, and so on. However, users seem to have little interest in PAAs. From the initial consensus, people are beginning to question the future of PAAs, and even some believe that Pure-paas will eventually die out or become a feature of IaaS or SaaS. What is on on with PaaS? These differences are fully reflected in the article.

What is the future trend of PAAs? Take history as a mirror, you can know Xing. This paper attempts to spying the future direction of PAAs by interpreting the major events that occur in PAAs development. What needs to be said is that as the boundaries between the various cloud services blur, the future of the PAAs is somewhat the same as the future of cloud services, it is difficult to separate the PAAs from the cloud services, but this article tries to control the scope in the PAAs.

PAAs Heat

Let's take a look at the "PAAs" Google trend and Baidu index. For Google, I used the keyword "Platform as a Service", because PAAs not only refers to the cloud computing domain PAAs, for Baidu, I directly use "PaaS" as a keyword. Overall, the temperature of PAAs continues to rise, both abroad and at home. In foreign countries, the launch of Google App engine in April 2008 was a landmark turning point, and the PAAs came into view, and in April 2011 VMware released Cloud Foundry and then continued to advertise in the market, The heat of the PAAs has risen to a new level. At home, there was a sudden rise in interest in PAAs at the end of 2012, followed by a more stable performance.

PAAs Event timeline (Timeline)

Not all events can see the direct change in Google's trend map as Gae releases and CF releases. More events are quantitative, and several events are related to each other, the longer time span of events occurred in a comprehensive interpretation, to help us see the essence.

I have listed the big events related to PAAs from 2008 to now in the following figure. Of course, there are a lot of PAAs-related events, and I choose what I personally think is the most important event, with a certain personal subjectivity. These events are divided into matrices: According to the occurrence time of the event, divided into the past (2007-2012) now (2013-2015), according to the type of enterprise, divided into Internet enterprises and traditional it enterprises. In the following chapters, I will read past and present events and explain some of the future of PAAs.

PAAs Past (2007 ~ 2012)

1.2007 Force.com announced.

Saleforce.com, as the most successful SaaS company, launched the Force.com platform to support customers in developing and deploying custom software and integrating with saleforces.com applications. Users can develop applications running on force.com with apex (similar to Java) and Visualforce (UI). Force.com is a meta data-driven architecture to implement multi-tenant mechanisms, so some people call force.com Metadata-paas.

SaaS companies need PAAs platforms that are inevitable. On the one hand to support the user's custom software, on the other hand from the technical upgrade point they need a PAAs platform to run their own SaaS software.

2.2008/04 Google App Engine beta version & 2009/11 SAE alpha release.

Gae and force.com are the originator of PAAs. When Google released Gae, the first paragraph of InformationWeek's story was:

The launch of Gae has a certain relationship with AWS. Google wants to compete for independent developers and start-ups through Gae and Amazon. Later developments showed that AWS was more successful in its bottom-up strategy, and Google had to launch GCE and support Consolidator VM in Gae to catch up with AWS. This will continue to be analyzed in subsequent "Google announced Consolidator VM support".

2009/11 Sina's SAE Alpha release is the only domestic event that appears in the diagram. The SAE is clearly the product of a domestic company imitating Google Gae. In addition to Sina, the domestic other internet giants have launched their own *ae services. But what they have in common is that these *ae are all services to their respective open platform strategies and do not have a complete independent status.

3. Heroku was Salesforce.com acquired

Heroku, a publicly-owned PAAs service that runs on AWS after Gae, is popular with ruby/rails developers, but it's not much different from gae on functionality. As a small number of public cloud Pure-paas service providers, Heroku was acquired, causing people to the public cloud Pure-paas follow-up development concerns.

Heroku is growing, but it's not as fast as it has been expected. And why? For simple, commonly used Web applications, the public cloud Pure-paas is ideal for developers to focus on the development of the business itself. However, to some extent the public cloud Pure-paas limits the developer's choice, and developers lose control of the entire stack. Once the business becomes complex, it will force users to choose from Pure-paas to IaaS, such as AWS. Therefore, the public cloud Pure-paas development space is limited. Heroku is not like *ae can rely on the giants of the open platform, its acquisition is a rational choice result.

Salesforce.com have force.com this PAAs platform, why buy Heroku? The reasonable explanation is that a single metadata-paas is difficult to meet all the requirements.

4.2011/01 AWS Beanstalk released

As the absolute leader of the publicly-owned IaaS Cloud, AWS is constantly moving up the stack: first, the introduction of various creator services, and the introduction of application management and deployment service, such as Cloudformation/beanstalk. On the technical implementation, Gae/heroku adopts the container isolation scheme, while Beanstalk uses VM isolation. AWS Beanstalk gives developers greater control because developers can log on to the VM to operate.

5.2010/02 Windows Azure Release & 2011/03 VMware release Cloud Foundry,redhat release OpenShift

Compared to internet companies, traditional IT companies ' activities during 2007-2012 should be said to be lackluster. Microsoft's action in cloud computing was the earliest, compared to ibm/oracle. Like Gae, Windows Azure was also positioned on the PAAs platform, but it subsequently added support for VM role.

VMware and Redhat are positioned not as public cloud "services", but as PAAs "products" for private cloud users. They first attract developers through an open-source strategy, then try to launch a commercial version or provide business support. The strategy worked well, and Cloud foundry in some ways a paas.

PAAs Now (2013 ~ 2015)

6.2013/03 Netflix launched the Netflixoss Cloud Prize

Netflix is the most successful case in AWS, and it signals that AWS not only meets the needs of small and medium-sized start-ups, but also meets the needs of large internet companies. Netflix's experience with building cloud-native applications is rich. Netflix believes there is a gap between AWS and the Cloud-native applications it is developing, and the hardest job is to build a PAAs that meets its business needs to make up for the gap. Netflix has been starting to open up some of the components of what they call PAAs since 2012.

7.2013/02 AWS Released Opsworks & Rightscale announced support for GCE

In the application management and deployment product line, after Cloudformation and Beanstalk, AWS launched the Opsworks service in 2013/02. AWS Opsworks combines application management, scalability, and performance. Opsworks supports a variety of devops principles, such as continuous integration. Not only can users control how the code is deployed, they can also use the Chef formula to configure the software on the server and use the AWS API to invoke various resources.

Opsworks's launch caused dissatisfaction among Rightscale and other AWS Partners, and Rightscale subsequently announced support for GCE. With AWS offering alternative-like services, cloud-management vendors such as Rightscale seem to have only multi-cloud support. However, I think that for different users, the gap between IaaS (possibly Multi-cloud, including private cloud and public cloud) and cloud-native application is different, and Rightscale software still has enough innovation space and market segment.

8.2014/02 Gae supports Consolidator VMs

Shortly after the release of GCE, Google announced that Gae supported the Consolidator VMS feature. Like Azure's VM role, this feature gives PAAs developers complete control.

As a result, future PAAs may become a function of IaaS, or there is no obvious boundary between them, and they are provided to the user as a whole offering, which proves the vision of AWS.

9.2013/12 Github reached 10m repositories & 2013/10 DotCloud company renamed Docker

These two events seem to have little to do with PAAs. GitHub and Open-source software are highly correlated because almost all of the well-known Open-source software can be found on GitHub. In the cloud era, open source software is used more and more. AWS-provided RDS for MySQL is popular and the Elasticcache service is based on both memcached and Redis. There is no conflict between the GPL open source protocol and cloud services, allowing more and more open source software to be chosen to build cloud services. On the other hand, there are more and more SaaS services like GitHub in the Alm software field, such as monitoring as a service, Load test as a service, continuous integration as a service. The impetus for such services to DevOps should not be overlooked.

Docker has been very hot since 2013, whether it is from GitHub code activity, or Redhat in RHEL6.5 integrated Docker support, even Google's compute engine also support Docker on its run. The impact of Docker on PAAs deserves sustained attention.

2014/03 Oracle and Microsoft Azure announced partnership

Oracle has previously had similar collaborations with AWS. Users can deploy Oracle software in AWS and can even directly use RDS for Oracle, which is completely managed by AWS. Oracle and Azure have also worked together to demonstrate the need for enterprise applications to migrate to the public cloud. For ORACLE/IBM, they certainly want their software to run in their own public cloud.

2013/11 Pivotal released CF Enterprise version &2014/02 CF Foundation

Pivotal release Enterprise version Cloud Foundry is expected. After that, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, IBM/HP/SAP and other giants have joined, a bit of the feeling of holding wood heating. For IBM/HP/SAP, choosing to join the foundation as a successor is a helpless choice. Cloud Foundry is not a PAAs, Cloud Foundry is just one part of the Giants ' PAAs strategy.

2014/03 Windows Azure is renamed Microsoft Azure & 2014/04 IBM release Bluemix

Microsoft's first strategic direction has been marked by the renaming of Windows Azure as Microsoft Azure after the CEO of the company took office. IBM, too, is at the crossroads of success. At the Pulse 2014 meeting, the company released a beta version of Bluemix, a PAAs product that integrates its own software and Third-party products through open Platform Technology (CF), designed to help developers quickly create cloud-based enterprise applications. IBM has the most complete software product line, the leading developer ecosystem, and has great influence on the methodology of software development. IBM's marketing DevOps is worth pondering.

The future of PAAs (2016 ~)

Having read the above analysis of the PAAs event, I hope the reader will have some thoughts about the future of the PAAs. I am here to share my thoughts and predictions about the future of PAAs.

1. Consider PAAs's future trends from PAAs features

What is the future trend of PAAs? I think the PAAs has three very core features, and this three feature has been and will continue to affect the development trend of PAAs.

2. Projections of the PAAs market competition pattern

The future PAAs competition is focused on the enterprise-level market. Traditional IT companies, although they started late, have a solid foundation in the enterprise-level market. Enterprise-class core applications are still running in the premise data center, and traditional It giants are sure to launch their own private cloud to prevent users from migrating core applications to the public cloud. And for Internet public cloud providers, they will continue to launch a variety of services to facilitate users to migrate applications to the public cloud.

In the course of this scramble, I think what's going to happen is:

3. A look forward to the development of domestic PAAs

As I said in my "thinking about three phenomena in domestic cloud computing," I expect the local IaaS service to place APIs as the first priority and provide APIs as soon as possible to provide space for the PAAs level of innovation. In the near future, we would like to see in addition to the traditional *ae and CF, in the cloud application management software, DevOps tools, hybrid cloud management tools, cloud-based ALM tools and other areas can be a situation of flowers contention.