Introduction
Enterprises today are presented with multiple software based approaches to accelerate businesses. Hyper scale cloud vendors are providing different as a service models for enterprises to accelerate their business outcomes. CIOs and CTOs are constantly being demanded more outcomes from business leaders to ensure that organizations meet their goals. As new technologies get launched, go through maturity cycles, the enterprise IT divisions have never been more stressed than now with the multitude of options available. With shadow IT across enterprises spinning of non compliant solutions and setting up own IT divisions, it is but natural for any organization to react to circumstances than proactively plan ahead. Fortunately with some planning, and architecture support, PaaS models can provide a major relief to stressed out IT chiefs
Platform as a Service (Paas)
PaaS models have been there in the market for a long time now. However industry has always been quick to adopt either a SaaS (Software as a Service) or an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model due to the inherent ease of operations. It should be noted that PaaS models have been sold by most hyperscale vendors as a bundled SaaS offering or a bundled IaaS offering just to make it easy for consumption. While this process has continued, developers have always struggled with these quasi models and have always demanded more. To that effect genuine PaaS models involving components like either a LAMP stack or a complete Hadoop Solution have found favor with developers.
With advent in computing models, and increased awareness and availability of technologies to set up and function hybrid clouds, genuine PaaS models in the enterprise are taking shape. PaaS through either hyperscale cloud vendors, or PaaS models in existing on -premise solutions are being set up to help developers and end users quick access to standard set of infrastructure and code that can help reduce time to market for products.
Analyst View
Analyst Reports from Gartner suggest the following trends in the PaaS model evolution
a. Booming PaaS market, with around 360 vendors, greater than 550 cloud platform services in 21 different categories and the market is expected to double by 2022
b. Continuing Cloud Platforms – advent of technologies which bring the cloud to an on prem datacenter and also encourage the use of cloud services like IaaS and SaaS integrate within the PaaS model
c. Evolution of Cloud Native designs that take the availability of new age technologies into developing cloud solution architectures for new age solutions
d. Enterprise IT evolving more into a service broker model, setting up validated designs into the organization using these PaaS models
My Perspective
Being in the core IT infrastructure world has been instrumental in the cloud transformation journeys of multiple clients. I have seen a gradual increase inline with market reports of PaaS adoption.
The single biggest reason clients have started preferring PaaS models is that the solution set can be architected to the enterprise IT standards, templatized and consumed within minutes. The added advantage that this can be used either through a hyperscale vendor or through on-prem data centers makes this approach more appealing to IT owners.
Other advantages that I have observed are use of a truly hybrid cloud approach, faster times to deploy and be part of the devops chain and discourage the shadow IT in the organization. I have also seen this use the existing capital investments to be completely recovered through careful planning and execution.
What Next
If you have significant challenges in the adoption of hyperscale cloud platforms and are still unable to maintain a good SLA with the business owners, do take a deep dive into PaaS models. If enterprise standards are what stops you from adopting cloud technologies, have a secondary look into the PaaS models and these may be the solution for enforcing standards and also rapid fast deployment of the entire stack
Think of yourself as the service brokers who have an additional catalog which can be easily customized and shared across the businesses to accelerate development and deployment. This would definitely help organizations achieve better results through the efficient use of technologies and also at a faster rate as configuration and standard management is pre done.
About the Author:
Author is a senior practitioner in the Cloud and Data Center consulting services. With more than 20 years in the IT industry across various domains he brings in critical views that aid enterprises in their IT journeys
Comments