Distinguish between true and false PAAs

Cloud computing has already blown the whirlwind, and as it matures, applications continue to grow and new users emerge. In the IT industry, services and infrastructure, services are becoming more of a duck. But because the cloud washes the white and the market is immature, the platform namely the service is still in the darkness before the dawn.

For a specific type of application, software as a service (SaaS), it is easy to access complex applications in one way, without substantial cash outlay, and only a very low management overhead. Similarly, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) attracts an increasing number of enterprises, providing a capability to access multiple, large amounts of computing, storage, and bandwidth resources, and can be controlled like a local infrastructure without upfront input.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a completely different scene. Largely embraced by prospective developers, PAAs's main value lies in increased productivity and faster deployment times. PAAs also provides built-in automatic scaling and failback, and if developers want to add these features to their applications, they don't need to learn these complex code.

"With prefabricated OS and development platforms, it's easy to apply deployment," Roger Jennings, Oakleaf Bae's chief consultant and a. NET Developer. While most it people naturally tend to use IaaS to meet their own needs, it takes only one-tenth of the time to build a Web site on Microsoft's Windows Azure PAAs.

Distinguish between true and false PAAs

Today, the PAAs market is only a small part of the entire public cloud market. But if PAAs succeeds, many experts are convinced that it will have a broad impact on it, and that their roles and responsibilities will change. But the market is still in its infancy, and for corporate IT it is hard to predict how many applications, what types of PAAs platforms, and PAAs's built-in applications are likely to fall.

PAAs Profiling

The first thing most IT departments need to do is understand the difference between a real PAAs and a fake PAAs.

"Do you remember that all the cloud washes we saw in the past were from infrastructure providers?" James Staten said that he was a Forrester Research analyst, "in the PAAs area is actually worse." ”

Staten explains that he often sees some vendors trying to make the old, IaaS, and adding a little service to the PAAs, to make developers and operators very confused.

From a core point of view, the real PAAs platform must include an abstract runtime environment, application servers, caching tiers, integrated development tools, increased automatic scaling, and failback capabilities. With an older term--the middleware--it can run on top of the public IaaS, or by running the delivery on the local hardware.

Real PAAs includes, but is not limited to, Microsoft Azure, Engine Yard, Heroku, Cloudbees, and Google App Engine. Elastic BeanStalk of Amazon Web Services (AWS), although often said to be PAAs, was completely sorry for its own bills and did not conform to PAAs rules.

"Elastic beanstalk adds some failback and extensible scripting to a script that deploys complex applications on IaaS," Staten said. Instead, the real PAAs does not provide a script, but exposes the components that can be invoked for the application.

The difference between a real PAAs and a fake PAAs is not just academic, but a real impact on the development team. For developers who believe they are developing on a PAAs, the expectation is "I write my code, I deploy it, I can automate the expansion and automate failback," Staten said, while the fake PAAs is "apps can't really extend and fail back." ”

PAAs Platform Source

Many PAAs platforms originate from specific programming languages. Over time, most PAAs vendors are beginning to transcend a single language and advocate multiple languages. However, it is worth remembering to find the best choice for your environment. Here are the incomplete lists of PAAs vendors and their original development environment.

appfog--php

Cloudbees--java

Cloudfoundry--ruby on Rails

Engine Yard--ruby on Rails, PHP

Google App Engine--python

Heroku--ruby

Microsoft Windows Azure ——. Net