Eight stumbling blocks on PAAs Take-off

Platform as a service (PaaS) is advertised as the next phase of cloud computing evolution, thanks to the middleware and database tiers that businesses want to seek to help expand, accelerate their own developer productivity, and abstract (and, if possible, commercialize).

Gartner is excited about all this and believes that 2015 will be the year of PAAs Take-off, and Gartner expects global PAAs sales to reach $1.8 billion trillion next year, a sharp increase to $2.9 billion by 2016.

However, Mike Kavis that there are still a lot of gaps in the PAAs to be in the corporate market, at least this year. In a recent article, he pointed out that at least eight problems made PAAs still untenable. Mike made it clear that he was very optimistic that PAAs would become a big market in a year or so. PAAs vendors are "actively responding" to any obstacles encountered, particularly those that affect PAAs promotion. But there are still a number of obstacles that affect the spread of PAAs, especially in the private cloud and mixed cloud applications of the enterprise:

Confusing market information: "Ask five people what a PAAs is, and you'll get five different answers," says Mike. From specialized areas such as mobile computing, development operations, and large data to generic areas, the PAAs solution is for application development. PAAs can be provided through a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid cloud.

Not mature: PAAs is faltering in enterprise promotion. "At three different levels of the cloud computing model (IaaS, PAAs, and SaaS), PAAs is by far the least mature," says Mike. ”

Lack of operational functionality: Unfortunately, PAAs has too much development and operational functionality is inadequate. Mike believes that most private cloud and hybrid cloud PAAs solutions "cater to the needs of developers, ignoring the needs of the operations team." "He is not the only one who holds this view: James Thomason also believes that PAAs still has too many" non-operational ", which poses new challenges to the" operations team ", such as data backup and migration, disaster recovery, security, and governance, which can have disastrous consequences if neglected. (But he also thinks PAAs will eventually emerge in 2015, so next year must be a PAAs take-off.) )

IaaS is immature: Another factor affecting PAAs maturity is the maturity of the underlying infrastructure, the service (IaaS), in private cloud deployments. "The vast majority of CIOs would rather fix the problem of IaaS before they embark on a PAAs trip," says Mike. ”

Cannot support both Java and. Net:paas providers boast that they support multiple development languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, node, and. Net, and so on. In most enterprises, Java and. NET is a prerequisite for both languages. The problem is that no provider is good at both languages. Apprenda and Microsoft preferred to support. NET, although they also support other languages, but their strength in. Net. While other PAAs providers show great enthusiasm for open source languages,. NET is their short board.

There is a problem with market speed: "Many companies have the belief that you can simply buy a PAAs solution, and then developers can immediately start to achieve faster market goals," says Mike. "But the reality is that" it takes a lot of effort to successfully implement a private PAAs project, as well as all the operational processes needed to provide SLAs, high availability, and an operational process that satisfies auditors and security teams, and can truly serve the application developer. ”

There is no clear industry leader: Mike says corporate CIOs are concerned that some vendors cannot survive in the business.

The value proposition has not been fully understood: "I cannot say how many companies are willing or unwilling to build ' PAAs of the poor ' on their IaaS level, which is unlikely to show all the advantages."