PaaS
P L A T F O R M A S A S E R V I C E
Powering a New Era of Business IT
PaaS
P L A T F O R M A S A S E R V I C E
Powering a New Era of Business IT
Gartner estimates a steep rise in PaaS adoption and forecasts an
increase in spending to more than $2.9 billion by 2016.
Why Has PaaS Suddenly Become
So Irresistible?
Cloud computing services are increasingly being adopted mainstream and are an
integral part of an enterprise IT strategy. In the last 12 months, adoption of platform
as a service (PaaS) has increased dramatically and it is now one of the fastest grow-
ing areas of all the cloud computing services. Gartner estimates a steep rise in PaaS
adoption and forecasts an increase in spending to more than $2.9 billion by 2016.
By 2016, Gartner estimates that every organization will run some or all of its
business software on public or private PaaS. IDC also expects a sharp uptake,
estimating that the worldwide PaaS market is set to increase to more than $14
billion by 2017 as organizations look to speed up application development and
decrease infrastructure costs. IDC predicts that over the next four years the
compound annual growth rate for PaaS will be around 30 percent.
Whatever analyst statistics are used to gauge the growth and uptake of PaaS, there
is no doubt that PaaS has become irresistible to organizations. This paper explores
why PaaS has suddenly become so relevant as well as the opportunities and
considerations associated with using PaaS from an application development and
deployment perspective. This paper outlines the ways PaaS can help enhance the
development process and explains how the OutSystems high-productivity PaaS
offering can help supercharge application delivery teams.
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PaaS – A Perfect Storm
There are a number of reasons why PaaS is experiencing fast market adoption.
Today, there are compelling economics around these offerings. Not only does PaaS
allow IT teams to do much more with what they have; it also reduces development
time - in some instances by as much as 50 percent. Add to this the fact that the
market is now maturing and you can start to see why organizations are seeking out
PaaS options.
Indeed, now that the cloud market has matured and infrastructure as a service
(IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) have become more or less household
names in the business environment, companies are now looking into PaaS with
renewed vigor.
Another driver is the increased demand for custom applications in order to gain
competitive advantage, especially as organizations look to innovate and get ahead
as we climb out of the recession. With the goal of getting quality applications to
market faster, we have also seen a rise in the need for and focus on DevOps.
DevOps represents a cultural shift in how business requirements are turned into
software. The fundamental goal of this culture is to simultaneously and significant-
ly increase the velocity and quality of software releases. These goals are directly
aligned with the fundamental mission of PaaS done well. The result of this align-
ment is that DevOps is a primary driver behind PaaS adoption within enterprises,
because without the frictionless environment enabled by certain vendors in this
new cloud service model, embracing DevOps is exceedingly difficult.
What is PaaS?
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services logically
sandwiched between SaaS and IaaS. There are various types of PaaS vendors. All
typically offer application hosting, a deployment environment, and varying levels
of scalability and automation. PaaS offerings may also include facilities for applica-
tion design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and management, as
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well as other services. In essence, PaaS is a
development platform that abstracts the
infrastructure, operating system and middle-
ware to drive developer productivity.
Using PaaS, customers can create process
extensions to existing apps or develop entire-
ly new apps that meet the needs of their
industry and business. PaaS offerings facilitate
the deployment of applications without the
cost and complexity of buying and managing
the underlying hardware and software stacks -
from networking and storage up through appli-
cation and web servers along with provision-
ing capabilities. However, the real benefits
extend way beyond the low start-up costs. As
you go from simple coder up to high-produc-
tivity platforms (see
Different PaaS for Different
Requirements
), more and more friction points
are eliminated via operational simplification
and automation. This will be explored more
in the next section.
As application development teams can easily
become the scapegoat for failed or late
projects, PaaS offers a quick and flexible
platform where new initiatives can be
driven forward more easily and are ‘fast to
value’. Development teams then become
more receptive to the demands of the
business and over time they start to build
better relationships leading to even more
efficiency and harmony.
1 Adapted from material presented by John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research, on
behalf of OutSystems 11.21.13.
SaaS
IaaS
Fixed Application
Defined Structures
Singular Purpose
UI Customizations
SaaS Extensions
Deep Customization
Integrations
Developer Services
APIs
Visual Infrastructure
OW/MW Configuration
Network and Storage
Definition
Application Containers
Platform, App Services
App Lifecycle MGMT
Development Tools
PaaS
PaaS
1
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Five Ways That PaaS Can Help
Enhance the Development Process
Let’s look at the opportunities that PaaS creates for organizations and how it can
enhance the development environment:
Faster access to infrastructure
In a non-PaaS environment, the time to provision machines can sometimes take up
to three months, which delays ROI and kills business agility. PaaS is the fastest way
to build and deploy enterprise applications. It allows organizations to gets results
in days and fundamentally supercharges the application development environ-
ment.
Greater scalability
The vectors of physical scalability (compute, storage, memory) and logical scalabil-
ity (load balancers, databases, middleware, front-end) are difficult to provision in
the traditional datacenter. PaaS automates and accelerates this process to enable
real elasticity and scalability. Certain PaaS offerings take this to the next level by
automating the discipline of scalable software design directly and seamlessly into
the development process.
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Faster time to release and iterate
Automating the activities outside of core design and development yields signifi-
cant software release velocity. This, coupled with slashing developer cycle time
from requirement to release, is a powerful productivity multiplier. Proper PaaS
solutions remove otherwise oppressive but common concerns like versioning,
multi-stage promotion, feedback capture, and performance instrumentation. This
enables developers, IT, and business users to collaborate and iterate with impres-
sive quality and speed.
Higher availability
Cloud enables developers to easily create solutions with high-availability, which
are typically difficult to provision and design on-premises. PaaS is also the perfect
way for application developers to respond to new service and change requests
from the business without breaking the bank.
Increased efficiency
With reliable automation and abstraction built in to many PaaS solutions, the IT
staff is released from time-consuming dull tasks allowing them to focus on
high-value activities. Developers, unencumbered by the tasks they weren’t happy
doing to begin with, are more motivated, creative, and fast. Business users, now
thrilled with newfound agility, are happier and naturally drawn closer to the
process that drives the DevOps culture and innovative results.
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Different PaaS for
Different Requirements
Different PaaS offerings are designed for different requirements. Before going
down the PaaS route, an organization needs to understand what is driving them to
the cloud. There are two main classifications of interest, PaaS platforms for coders
and high-productivity PaaS plaforms.
Integration
in the Cloud
DevOps
High-Productivity
App Dev
IaaS
mBaaS
(Mobile Backend
as a Service)
High-Control
PaaS
High-
Productivity
PaaS
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PaaS platforms for coders
PaaS platforms for coders are designed for developers that are looking to take their
existing approach and move it to the cloud. There are efficiencies to be gained by
leveraging the fact that the underlying infrastructure is an always-available service
that doesn’t start with slow internal infrastructure requests. Often these platforms
are used for deployment and scaling of existing or new custom applications that
are developed in-house. In most cases, a PaaS platform for coders doesn’t make the
actual application development or physical coding any faster, but the process can
become more streamlined and the elasticity of PaaS means that the project can
more easily scale. Coder platform providers include companies like CloudBees,
Microsoft Azure and EngineYard (among many others).
High-productivity PaaS platforms
High-productivity PaaS platforms are targeted at organizations that are
looking to fundamentally accelerate their current design, develop, deploy,
scale, and manage process for some or all of their applications. Usually the
vendor will supply not only the stack but also the rich design environment
enabling rapid creation, delivery, and ongoing change of applications. A point of
difference among many of these vendors is openness. Some vendors take the
approach of abstracting existing approaches in an effort to provide a simpler
overall experience, while others embrace existing approaches and accelerate
them. An organization’s tolerance of lock-in, requirements for flexibility and need
to integrate existing code are likely to be key decision factors here.
The OutSystems Platform is a great example of a high-productivity PaaS solution
that embraces and accelerates existing approaches. The OutSystems Platform
abstracts away the complexity of conventional computer code, generating much
of the routine parts of an application (in Java or C#) leaving developers free to
concentrate on the high-value business logic. The OutSystems Platform enables IT
departments to deliver innovative business solutions by significantly reducing the
time and cost to build and modify applications, which leads to eliminating the
ongoing change request backlog.
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What You Need to Consider if You Are
Going Down the PaaS Route
There are typically five key considerations that enterprises need to take into
account. These are:
Fit for purpose
PaaS is a very generic term. There is no one-size-fits-all. Depending on your goals,
one PaaS may be better than the other - the same way an on-premises BPM, ESB,
high-productivity or continuous integration platform is good for some things but
not as good for others. A PaaS for coders will not increase productivity if the need
is to accelerate building and changing apps. It just facilitates the infrastructure
provisioning piece. The first criteria in moving to PaaS should be to understand
what kind of benefit is expected, what kind of applications are expected, and how
each PaaS will help.
Ability to scale and support enterprise grade
applications
Many PaaS offerings are still being used for experimental purposes or small appli-
cations. The marginal savings on the smaller apps is still interesting, but to bet on a
particular PaaS, a full understanding of the environment is required to know what
it will be like when critical apps are being built there. It is with these apps that PaaS
becomes truly compelling.
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Application portability and vendor lock-in
Whether already moving or just starting to experiment, as with any other technolo-
gy, your investment must be protected in case it doesn't work out the way you
expect. How quickly can one recover from a bad decision? How much time and
effort has been wasted?
Security
IaaS providers generally have better security than most organizations do in their
own data centers. However, as one moves closer to the PaaS layer, security policies
regarding how data is stored, secured and shared between multiple customers is
not as clear. The fact is that applications are exposed to the world by default. The
best strategy is to go with a PaaS that isolates one "tenant" from others, leveraging
the security of the IaaS layer, not disregarding it. Every tenant should have the
same level of security as a private data center would provide, and then open up
from there - instead of sharing everything and relying on the PaaS (virtual/log-
ic/application) layers to ensure isolation.
Integration
Moving to the cloud does not happen overnight, and in many cases it won’t make
sense to move everything there. Organizations still have on-premises systems that
will require integration, some quite heavily, for many years to come. Being able to
securely and easily integrate with them is a critical requirement. That can take the
form of an application running entirely on-premises, or perhaps one application
that handles the heavy integration and data manipulation tasks on-premises thus
making services available to front-end applications that leverage the ubiquitous
access and elasticity of the cloud.
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Integration
in the Cloud
DevOps
High-Productivity
App Dev
IaaS
mBaaS
(Mobile Backend
as a Service)
High-Control
PaaS
High-
Productivity
PaaS
(tibco, boomi)
(heroku, cloudbees)
OutSystems Platform
OutSystems Platform
Conclusion
It now makes more and more sense for enterprises to investigate the benefits of
using PaaS. Adoption won’t happen immediately, but trust and confidence will
build gradually as organizations move certain aspects of their development into
the cloud. PaaS gives organizations options. For example, a project may start in the
cloud because it is quick and easy to fire up and multiple approvals aren’t required
to get the project underway. Over time development may move more and more
into the cloud, or a hybrid environment may result. All of these scenarios can be
seamlessly handled by the right PaaS vendor.
Today PaaS is scalable, reliable and more mature. It’s a viable service model
compared to other more traditional options available to application development
teams. It also removes a lot of the friction currently experienced between the appli-
cation development team and the rest of the business. So it is really no wonder
PaaS is being touted as the fastest growing area in cloud computing.
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About OutSystems
OutSystems makes it exceedingly easy for IT organisations to build, deploy and
manage enterprise-class web and mobile applications – helping IT deliver innova-
tive business solutions fast. OutSystems is the only platform as a service (PaaS)
available as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution that generates standard Java
and .NET applications with fully automated DevOps support. Hundreds of compa-
nies in 24 countries across 22 industries use the OutSystems Platform to rapidly
deliver custom, mission-critical applications while improving IT productivity and
reducing their change request backlog.
Learn more at
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