PaaS, or platform as a service, is just one pillar of three in the category of cloud computing services that provides the computing platform with a solution stack as a service.
An article in InfoWorld from earlier this year brought up a great point, however – what is PaaS’ place in the enterprise, especially when IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is now offering many of its own platforms capabilities, in addition to the baseline infrastructure?
The article shared some interesting - albeit rather extreme - stats from Gartner which estimate that “of the $131 billion cloud computing market, PaaS represents only about 1 percent, whereas SaaS (software as a service) sits at 14.7 percent of the market and IaaS at 5.5 percent.”
There is a stark difference in the sheer representation of PaaS compared to the others, and part of that reason might be that many platform providers are now working with infrastructure providers to collaborate and provide each other a place to build applications – and an infrastructure to support said applications. The benefit of PaaS is that it provides an enterprise with one unified, standardized platform for development. However, in some cases, those standards can differ across platforms – and if the enterprise is leveraging separate infrastructure services, it defeats the purpose of a standardized process and counteracts its aim to simplify the lives of IT.
Markley Cloud Services (MCS) is a great example of a solution and service that is making life easier for CIOs and IT clients – our enterprise-class IaaS solution maximizes IT performance, reduces upfront capital expenses, increases speed to market, and lets companies focus on their core business and driving innovation. To help our clients in their development, Markley Cloud Services supports the vCloud API, which is an easy-to-use, RESTful programming interface. Using the vCloud API, clients can perform almost any function programmatically from a script – including starting and stopping vApps and VMs, deploying new vApps, configuring vApps and other functions.
It will be interesting to see where the marketplace goes from here as more and more end-users look to incorporate hybrid cloud environments into their overall cloud strategy. PaaS likely won’t go away completely, rather be folded into services like MCS where it makes sense for clients to incorporate all of their cloud application development, hosting and infrastructure services into a one-stop solution.
As David Linthicum of InfoWorld puts it, “The fact of the matter is that PaaS is not dying, but it is changing. PaaS is indeed being combined with IaaS. It makes sense for PaaS capabilities to exist as part of an IaaS provider's platform because PaaS needs access to storage services, databases services, compute services, and so on. This is a good thing. PaaS is adjusting to the needs of the market.”
We couldn’t agree more and are committed daily to adjusting to our own clients’ needs when it comes to cloud capabilities.
