The PAAs will usher in the spring the developer becomes the user principal

With the growing popularity of the cloud computing industry, the platform as a service (Platform-as-a-service, PAAs) has been developed correspondingly, but it is still overlooked by many analysts, companies and developers. Research has shown that PAAs will no longer be the ugly duckling, and they will thrive in the years ahead.

While the entire cloud computing industry is worth 109 billion dollars, PAAs can only account for around 1% of the total, according to research firm Gartner. By 2016, however, PAAs services could have reached $2.9 billion trillion or more than 2% of the total cloud computing industry. More bullish than GARTNER,IDC on PAAs services, they think the service will grow at 30% a year in the next four years. Although the PAAs service is not large now, PAAs is the second fastest growing in the cloud computing field and should be of concern to the relevant sectors.

What is a PAAs

According to Gartner's classification, cloud computing is divided into four pieces: infrastructure as services, platforms as services, software as services and business processes as services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and BPaaS). Their differences are detailed in the previous article: "IaaS, PAAs, and SaaS companies are doing."

PAAs, between SaaS and IaaS, provides developers and companies with an environment for easier operation and deployment of application software. PAAs enables users to deploy and create cloud infrastructures to clients, or to use programming languages, libraries, and services. Users do not need to manage and control the cloud infrastructure, including networks, servers, operating systems, or storage, but need to control the environment in which the upper-level application deployment and application are hosted. The PAAs, it says, eliminates the hassle of setting up, configuring, and eliminating the need for too much management of servers and databases.

The most compelling part of PAAs is that it not only improves the speed of developing applications, but also saves development costs. In addition, developers can focus more on application innovation and business. Currently the PAAs main service providers are Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine) and Microsoft (Azure).

Look at the chart below and you'll see why PAAs fits into the mainstream of cloud computing.

The arrival of the prosperous times

On a scale, PAAs still lags far behind SaaS, IaaS, and BPaaS. In 2012, PAAs earned only 1.2 billion dollars, which were one-twelveth of SaaS (14.4 billion USD), one-fifth (6.2 billion dollars) of IaaS, and a fraction of the BPaaS (84.1 billion USD). But the PAAs growth is pretty good compared to its own.

Research firm IDC seems to be more bullish on PAAs than Gartner. They believe the global PAAs market will grow from $2.6 billion trillion in 2011 to $9.8 billion trillion in 2016, which means annual growth of more than 30%.

By 2016, IDC believes, public PAAs revenues will account for 8.5% of the overall cloud computing industry, mainly from application development and deployment. "The future of the PAAs is exciting," said Stephen Hendrick, vice president of the company's application development and Deployment Research Division.

Just this week, Salesforce chief operating officer George Hu revealed at the demo Fall 2012 that their platform services were beyond their own CRM in terms of API calls. "This phenomenon keeps me awake at night, and Salesforce is facing rapid changes. ”

Engine Yard is also a small business that provides PAAs services, with a revenue of 28 million dollars last year. Recently, they have done a survey that shows that PAAs is being watched by more and more large and medium enterprises. Two-thirds of the respondents said they had used (or planned within two years) of this type of service. Mark Gaydos, senior vice president of Engine yard, says the company is ready to nibble on its market share.

Now let's look at a few large PAAs service providers for a better understanding of it.

Heroku

Salesforce's Heroku is an important service provider in the PAAs market, where more than 2.3 million applications are deployed. Heroku's clients include Wal-Mart, Macy's, Blizzard and GroupMe.

Heroku chief operating officer Oren Teich said in an interview: "We have seen the turning point of PAAs, we are also innovative in our services, the road is long." "He conservatively estimates that Heroku will serve more than 5 million applications a year." According to the current momentum, more than 6 million or even 7 million is also possible. Salesforce is still reluctant to disclose the income generated by Heroku.

Google App Engine

Google was the first company to provide PAAs services, and it released a preview in April 2008.

Google is also reluctant to disclose the revenue generated by the app engine. The use of APP engine is growing fast, according to Google's statistics. At this year's Google I/O conference, the giant announced that the platform supports 1 million applications, and 250,000 active developers use the platform to build applications. By contrast, in 2011 the two data were 200,000 applications and 100,000 developers.

A Google spokeswoman says more than half of all internet visitors have direct or indirect links to servers in Google App engine. This platform handles 2 trillion data storage operations per month.

Microsoft Windows Azure

In the past 12 months, Azure's users have doubled, says Steven Martin, general manager of the Azure operations team. Microsoft has also increased its computing power by one-fold to accommodate the needs of more azure users.

"For the past two years we have been trying to catch up. In the long run, PAAs will be widely used in the development of programs. ”

Other service Providers

The PAAs market also includes small service companies such as VMware's Cloud Foundry, Appfog, DotCloud, Cloudbees, Engine yard and Salesforce.

Among them, Appfog hosted more than 60,000 applications, compared with just 10,000 last year. The company recently acquired a PAAs service provider, Nodester, which supports the Node.js programming environment.

Developers in the mainstream

RedMonk analyst Steve O ' Grady points out that PAAs had not been so bullish because the force.com, Google App engine and Microsoft's Azure, like Salesforce, did not meet market expectations. O ' Grady points out: "In terms of usage, the early PAAs mostly failed." Force.com and Google App engine, although they have accumulated some users, have not achieved the desired results. ”

That is to say, there are some barriers that prevent the mass market from adopting this service. The first is that large enterprises do not allow PAAs. Appfog's Carlson believes that CIOs are more inclined to build their own capabilities and services, and they don't like PAAs service providers to do their jobs instead of themselves (Editor's note: security issues?). ）。

Developers are starting to use PAAs services against the IT giants. Because most of its technology costs are low and open source. PAAs has also greatly increased their productivity and reduced engineering costs. O ' Grady thinks it's no longer important for the chief digital officer to evaluate PAAs anymore because the developers have accepted it.

What is the second hurdle that hinders the use of PAAs? Not many people know what a PAAs can do to help them accomplish anything. Heroku's Teich points out that when they talk about PAAs with developers or entrepreneurs, they don't know they have other options. It can be said that they lack the relevant knowledge of popularization. "Many developers have preconceived notions about the choice of PAAs services." But from another perspective, PAAs's growth potential is huge. ”