PaaS does not have the traction of IaaS and SaaS, but with its clear value proposition, why are enterprise businesses passing on PaaS?
Platform-as-a-Service is the awkward middle child of the cloud service industry. The value proposition of its siblings higher and lower in the stack are easy to understand. Infrastructure-as-a-service provides the virtual hardware, on-demand, that can be used for anything for which a company would have previously needed to deploy dedicated hardware. Software-as-a-service offers ready-made solutions that fit well with modern business computing.
| Source: Wikipedia |
Platform-as-a-service, on the other hand, is a little bit of both—on demand compute and storage resources without the hassle of managing a virtual infrastructure and a ready-made software stack that provides a trouble-free platform for developing and deploying SaaS and mobile applications.
So why is PaaS having such trouble penetrating the enterprise (as opposed to SMBs where it does have penetration), where IaaS and SaaS are booming?
I think there is a combination of factors: some historical, some to do with current implementations, and some to do with new technologies that neatly fill the niche that PaaS providers are aiming for.
Historically, IaaS was the “original” cloud platform. It’s a mature modality and it’s well understood by large businesses. However leery the enterprise may have been at the beginning of the cloud era, over the last decade they have jumped in with both feet as IaaS providers have shaped products to allay their concerns and meet their needs.
Big business needs big infrastructure that it can it can control and know. Price is less of an issue for big business, and they have no shortage of IT expertise that can manage virtual infrastructure as they transition from legacy physical deployments. Control of the stack is important, and that’s exactly what PaaS doesn’t offer—PaaS provides limited control of software and versions, limited control of physical deployments, and limited service level agreements. IaaS allows for complete control of the stack and the IaaS industry has more than met the enterprise’s demand for service level agreements.
Then there are new technologies that are disrupting PaaS before it’s even managed to gain a foothold. The big buzz at the moment is all about container technology, particularly Docker. Docker allows for the creation of portable development environments that can be deployed on anything from a cloud server to a developer’s MacBook: Docker images are eminently flexible and configurable, and are perfectly suited for exactly the sort of tasks that would have been the domain of PaaS.
Except, of course, that container users still need the physical infrastructure, which is where IaaS steps in. Containers on IaaS remove many of the difficulties that may make IaaS unattractive—complex server setups, non-portable environments, vendor lock-in—and provide similar advantages to PaaS. Hosting companies that leverage container management technologies on top of existing IaaS platforms or dedicated hardware are popping up like mushrooms (Tutum, Orchard, StackDock), which leaves PaaS out in the cold.
I’ve no doubt that specific PaaS offerings with narrow scope—BaaS, DaaS, etc—will survive and flourish, but the wider success of PaaS in the enterprise is harder to predict with any confidence.
About John- John Mack is a technical writer for Datarealm, one of the oldest web hosting companies. You can follow Datarealm on Twitter, @datarealm, Like them on Facebook, and check out more of their web hosting articles on their blog, http://www.datarealm.com/blog.