Why Platform as a Service (PaaS) Adoption will take off in 2017..

Since the time Steve Ballmer went ballistic professing his love for developers, it has been a virtual mantra in the technology industry that developer adoption is key to the success of a given platform. On the face of it – Platform as a Service(PaaS) is a boon to enterprise developers who are tired of the inefficiencies of old school application development environments & stacks. Further, a couple of years ago, PaaS seemed to be the flavor of the future given the focus on Cloud Computing. This blogpost focuses on the advantages of the generic PaaS approach while discussing its lagging slow rate of adoption in the cloud computing market – as compared with it’s cloud cousins – IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).

Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the foundation for developing Digital, Cloud Native Applications…

Call them Digital or Cloud Native or Modern. The nature of applications in the industry is slowly changing. So are the cultural underpinnings of the development process and culture themselves- from waterfall to agile to DevOps. At the same time, Cloud Computing and Big Data are enabling the creation of smart data applications. Leading business organizations are cognizant of the need to attract and retain the best possible talent – often competing with the FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix & Google).

Couple all this with the immense industry and venture capital interest around container oriented & cloud native technologies like Docker – you have a vendor arms race in the making. And the prize is to be chosen as the standard for building industry applications.

Thus, infrastructure is enabling but in the end- it is the applications that are Queen or King.

That is where PaaS comes in.

Financial Services IT begins to converge towards Software Defined Datacenters..

Enter Platform as a Service (PaaS)…

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one of the three main cloud delivery models, the other two being IaaS (Infrastructure such as compute, network & storage services) and SaaS (Business applications delivered over a cloud). A collection of different cloud technologies, PaaS focuses exclusively on application development & delivery. PaaS advocates a new kind of development based on native support for concepts like agile development, unit testing, continuous integration, automatic scaling, while providing a range of middleware capabilities. Applications developed on these can be deployed out as services & managed across thousands of application instances.

In short, PaaS is the ideal platform for creating & hosting digital applications. What can PaaS provide that older application development toolchains and paradigms cannot?

While the overall design approach and features vary across every PaaS vendor – there are five generic advantages from a high level –

1. PaaS enables a range of Application, Data & Middleware components to be delivered as API based services to developers on any given Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).  These capabilities include-  Messaging as a service, Database as a service, Mobile capabilities as a service, Integration as a service, Workflow as a service, Analytics as a service for data driven applications etc. Some PaaS vendors also provide ability to automate & manage APIs for business applications deployment on them – API Management.
2. PaaS provides easy & agile access to the entire suite of technologies used while creating complex business applications. These range from programming languages to application server (and lightweight) runtimes to programming languages to CI/CD toolchains to source control repositories.
3. PaaS provides the services which enables a seamless & highly automated manner of building the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services on the internet. Industry players are infusing software delivery processes with practices such as continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI). For large scale applications such as those built in web scale shops, financial services, manufacturing, telecom etc – PaaS abstracts away the complexities of building, deploying & orchestrating infrastructure thus enabling instantaneous developer productivity. This is a key point – with it’s focus on automation – PaaS can save application and system administrators precious time and resources in managing the lifecycle of elastic applications
4. PaaS enables your application to be ‘kind of cloud’ agnostic & can enable applications to be run on any cloud platform whether public or private. This means that a PaaS application developed on Amazon AWS can easily be ported to Microsoft Azure to VMWare vSphere to Red Hat RHEV etc
5. PaaS can help smoothen organizational Culture and Barriers – The adoption of a PaaS forces an agile culture in your organization – one that pushes cross pollination among different business, dev and ops teams. Most organizations are just now beginning to go bimodal for greenfield applications can benefit immensely from choosing a PaaS as a platform standard.

The Barriers to PaaS Adoption Will Continue to Fall In 2017..

In general, PaaS market growth rates do not seem to line up well when compared with the other broad sections of the cloud computing space, namely IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service). 451 Research’s Market Monitor forecasts that the total market for cloud computing (including PaaS, IaaS and infrastructure software as a service (ITSM, backup, archiving) – will hit $21.9B in 2016 more than doubling to $44.2bB by 2020. Of that, some analyst estimates contend that PaaS will be a relatively small $8.1 billion.

  (Source – 451 Research)

The advantages that PaaS confers have sadly also caused its relatively low rate of adoption as compared to IaaS and SaaS.

The reasons for this anemic rate of adoption include, in my opinion  –  

1. Poor Conception of the Business Value of PaaS –  This is the biggest factor holding back explosive growth in this category. PaaS is a tremendously complicated technology & vendors have not helped by stressing on the complex technology underpinnings (containers, supported programming languages, developer workflow, orchestration, scheduling etc etc) as opposed to helping clients understand the tangible business drivers & value that enterprise CIOs can derive from this technology. Common drivers include increased time to market for digital capabilities, man hours saved in maintaining complex applications, ability to attract new talent etc. These factors will vary for every customer but it is up to frontline Sales teams to help deliver this message in a manner that is appropriate to the client.
2. Yes, you can do DevOps without PaaS but PaaS helps a long way  – Many Fortune 500 organizations are drawing up DevOps strategies which do not include a PaaS & are based on a simplified CI/CD pipeline. This is to the detriment of both the customer organization & the industry as PaaS can vastly simplify a range of complex runtime & lifecycle services that would otherwise need to be cobbled together by the customer as the application moves from development to production. There is simply a lack of knowledge in the customer community about where a PaaS fits in a development & deployment toolchain.
3. Smorgasbord of Complex Infrastructure Choices – The average leading PaaS includes a range of open source technologies ranging from containers to runtimes to datacenter orchestration to scheduling to cluster management tools. This makes it very complex from the perspective of Corporate IT – not just it terms of running POCs and initial deployments but also to manage a highly complex stack. It is incumbent on the open source projects to abstract away the complex inner workings to drive adoption  -whether by design or by technology alliances.
4. You don’t need Cloud for PaaS but not enough Technology Leaders get that – This one is perception. The presence of an infrastructural cloud computing strategy is not a necessary condition for PaaS. 
5. The false notion that PaaS is only fit for massively scalable, greenfield applications – Industry leading PaaS’s (like Red Hat’s OpenShift) support a range of technology approaches that can help cut technical debt. They donot limit deployment on an application server platform such as JBOSS EAP or WebSphere or WebLogic, or a lightweight framework like Spring.
6. PaaS will help increase automation thus cutting costs – For developers of applications in Greenfield/ New Age spheres such as IoT, PaaS can enable the creation of thousands of instances in a “Serverless” fashion. PaaS based applications can be composed of microservices which are essentially self maintaining – i.e self healing and self scalable up or down; these microservices are delivered (typically) by IT as Docker containers using automated toolchains. The biggest requirement in large datacenters – human involvement – is drastically reduced if PaaS is used – while increasing agility, business responsiveness and efficiencies.

Conclusion…

My goal for this post was to share a few of my thoughts on the benefits of adopting a game changing technology. Done right, PaaS can provide a tremendous boost to building digital applications thus boosting the bottom line. Beginning 2017, we will witness PaaS satisfying critical industry use cases as leading organizations build end-to-end business solutions that covers many architectural layers.

References…

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/03/13/roundup-of-cloud-computing-forecasts-and-market-estimates-2016/#3d75915274b0