Monthly News International
PaaS Development Stacks
Client Challenges: Clients are debating what applications to move to the cloud and want to know what development stacks are supported by the various platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers. This information is needed to determine the feasibility of moving certain legacy products to the cloud. Experton Group addresses that challenge for a number of PaaS providers and examines some other relevant issues.
Observations and Recommendations: Clients looking to move applications to the cloud actually have two different cloud models to evaluate: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and PaaS providers. If the enterprise is willing to take on the added burden of providing its own application development and management tools, and platform services, an IaaS solution might suffice. However, unless the company is fully prepared for building and supporting its own PaaS environment, Experton Group would not recommend taking this path. Nonetheless, it is an option that should at least be considered.
On the other hand, if IT executives want a platform that fully supports all of its development and production needs, then a PaaS solution is required. There are a number of PaaS providers but the market is fragmented. That is, there is not one single type of PaaS solution, most of which are not suitable for application development and production. The following represents some of the classes of PaaS offerings:
- Application Catalog Exchanges
- Application life cycle management
- Application security
- Application servers
- Business process management
- Data management
- Data integration
- eXtreme TP
- Managed file transfer
- Messaging middleware
- Portals
Development Platforms/Stacks: Of all the previously-mentioned PaaS offerings, only two provide development platforms and stacks – application life cycle management (ALM) and application servers. Within those categories the leading vendors that Experton Group evaluated are:
- Amazon Inc.
- Google Inc.
- IBM Corp.
- Microsoft Corp.
- Oracle Corp.
- Red Hat Inc.
- RightScale Inc.
- Salesforce.com Inc.
- VMware Inc.
The Bottom Line: Experton Group believes PaaS solutions are still immature and evolving. However, this does not negate using them in development, test or production environments. IT executives should assume that all vendors and their solutions will undergo change over the course of any contract period. There may be acquisitions, divestitures, mergers, or even decisions to cease the service desired. Thus, IT executives should ensure that all contracts for PaaS services address all the financial and operational possibilities and protect the enterprise from worst case scenarios.
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