The Many Faces of PaaS
June 18, 2013
Grazed from Virtualization Practice. Author: Mike Kavis.
By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). This confusion is one reason why enterprises have been slow to adopt PaaS. Why is there so much confusion? Because PaaS is still in its early days of maturity, but it is growing up really quickly right before our eyes.
In the early days, PaaS solutions were limited to running on a single stack and on the PaaS provider’s infrastructure. For example, Force.com required Apex, Google required Python (they have added other languages over the years), Heroku required Ruby, and Microsoft required .NET. Of the four, only Heroku did not require that customers run on their own infrastructure, but to use Heroku you had to run on AWS. Although many eager developers started building on top of PaaS, very few enterprises took the leap of faith because of the constraints…
The next wave of PaaS emerged where companies like EngineYard started supporting multiple stacks like Rails, Python, PHP, Java, etc. Heroku added additional stacks as well. That was great but the enterprises wanted to dictate where the data would reside and even the type of infrastructure to run the applications on. Enterprises wanted to use a combination of bare metal servers, virtualized servers, and container-based servers…
Read more from the source @ http://www.virtualizationpractice.com/the-many-faces-of-paas-22018/