PaaS: Down-to-earth Cloud computing services

Everyone recently put a four-letter word on his mouth: p-a-a-s. From rumors that Microsoft will give up Azure's name to Red Hat's hybrid platform, the service program, the development platform is also beginning to infect the noise from the cloud. What is all this noise around the platform, the service (PaaS)?

PAAs provides a large portion of the benefits of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), especially for companies that do not have the ability to handle the cloud infrastructure within the enterprise.

ARTstor, an online photo gallery for universities and museums, has been forced to allow subscribers to put their own pictures on the Web site's system under pressure and to be able to search Google. The work required the company's lack of manpower, Eugene Dvorkin said he was ARTstor's chief architect and developer.

In essence, PAAs enables all types of enterprises to take advantage of the resilience and computational power of the cloud commitment. Once you pull out of the cloud's essential infrastructure, you don't have to deal with server-level stuff, says Steve Harris, a cloudbees product VP, a java-based PAAs provider.

The choice of the right PAAs provider is traceable, in the final analysis, ARTstor is familiar and can be simplified.

"We used MongoDB, but not in the middle of production," Dvorkin said, "We observed Heroku and Amazon elastic Beanstalk;" Heroku requires us to be familiar with git, a development mechanism we are not familiar with. Elastic Beanstalk, we have to do all our own integration. ”

Eventually, ARTstor to Cloudbees, because the company is easier to transfer than other options, Dvorkin said. The ARTstor operations team is also familiar with Jenkins, an open-source continuous Integration Server project that Cloudbees support.

Although some people say that the hype around PAAs is exaggerated, it does have a place. Especially suitable for departmental use, as the department needs to get applications and run fast, like startups. "We have to do it as quickly as possible, and the operations team is not able to execute quickly," Dvorkin says. "The cloud provider offers instant gratification." ”

Building a good business will, on the other hand, be entangled in the transfer of legacy applications to PAAs.

"It would be nice if we just deployed existing applications in Cloudbees. We're not going to be able to move all apps, because we're in a mixed environment, "Dvorkin says." If an instance can do everything, it's better. ”

For many businesses, moving to PAAs requires some internal infrastructure changes.

"Our next step is to transfer other applications to the cloud, but we need to upgrade the infrastructure and deploy it in the PAAs," Dvorkin added, "There will be refactoring work because we rely on hard drive, which is not working in a cloud environment." ”