Executive Point of View: Transforming Your Business with Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Transcription

1 Executive Point of View: Transforming Your Business with Platform as a Service (PaaS)

2 Executive Summary Businesses around the world are reinventing themselves to remain competitive in a time when agility, efficiency and constant change is the new normal. Strategic, thoughtful evolution is required to meet these changes head on. The most successful companies are doing so with a critical eye on three factors: u u u Customers are more connected than ever, demanding more customized experience, on-demand scale, ubiquitous access and business analytics. Keeping customers at the center of every decision is critical. Competitive landscape has become more dynamic. Biggest is no guarantee of being the best. Foresight, innovating thinking and ability to quickly respond to customer s need are what create new market leaders. Organizational structures and models have evolved. Businesses that foster innovation and collaboration require new ways of thinking and operating to create efficiencies and increase the power of their human capital. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model of cloud services, describing its value, components and its place in an overall cloud adoption and migration strategy. Then we showcase seven of the largest and most powerful PaaS companies and their public and private PaaS offerings. We examine the services offered by these platforms and provide a comparison chart and decision checklists to facilitate selecting the most appropriate platform for transforming your organization to increase efficiencies and power of innovation. 2

3 CIOs and CEOs need to get in front of this revolutionary shift with a comprehensive strategy, which lays the foundation of an agile and high-performance business. 3

4 What is PaaS? on-premises IaaS PaaS SaaS Client Manages Applications Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Client Manages Vendor Manages In Cloud Applications Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Client Manages Vendor Manages In Cloud Applications Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking Vendor Manages In Cloud Applications Data Runtime Middleware O/S Virtualization Servers Storage Networking PaaS is an application development environment that allows developers to build cloud-based applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure (hardware and software).

5 What is PaaS? Private Public Micro CLOUDS PaaS A PaaS provides ready-to-use libraries, tools, and services, such as databases, security, user management, monitoring, and analytics, which can be easily baked into (or integrated with) the applications you are developing. PaaS can support applications written different in frameworks for a wide variety of programming languages, such as Java, Python, Ruby,.NET, etc. Platform as a Service (PaaS) 5

6 PaaS in Context of Cloud Services Stack SaaS Office 365, Workday, NetSuite, Salesforce, Google Apps, Taleo, Jira, Mail Chimp, Marketo, Zuora, MS Dynamics, GitHub, Sharepoint In the larger picture of cloud-based service models, PaaS sits in between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), as shown in Figure 2. PaaS Cloud Foundry, Heruko, Microsoft Azure, RightScale, Software AG Load Balancers, Messaging, DBMS, Web Servers OS, Authentication, Lifecycle Monitoring, Logging, Broker Infrastructure as a Service Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is service model for delivering on-demand infrastructure. It provides the ability to access, manage and monitor physical and virtual resources like computing, storage, and databases. IaaS Openstack, VMware vcloud, Microsoft SC, Amazon, Joyent, Rackspace Virtual Machines Storage Virtual Machines Hypervisors Virtualization, Management Servers Storage Networks Software as a Service Software as a Service (SaaS) is an on-demand delivery model for providing applications and services to customers. These applications are hosted in the cloud and typically accessed by users using a thin client or a web browser. Figure 2: Cloud Services Stack 6

7 Why Do You Need PaaS? SaaS PaaS makes it easier to develop, deploy, run, and scale applications. Cloud Foundry, Heruko, Microsoft Azure, RightScale, Software AG, App Engine, Force.com, Heroku, Inktank, RightScale, OpenShift, openqrm PaaS IaaS Web Services Authentication and Authorization Languages and Runtimes Data Management Load Balancing Broker and Payment Monitoring, Logging and Notification Lifecycle Management OS Deployment and Auto scaling Tools and Libraries SDK Monitoring, Queues A growing number of businesses: transitioning from packaged software to cloud-based services. adding analytics, mobile back-end, and database services (dbpaas) to their products, to enhance the products and improve their customers experience PaaS technology supports a variety of clouds, application styles, and services. 7

8 Different Ways To Get To PaaS Many organizations are migrating to PaaS to facilitate their DevOps models and cloud-sourced business analytics. Typically PaaS adoption usually follows successful use of SaaS and IaaS; Since PaaS sits between these two layers, there are natural synergies to be exploited. SaaS users are looking at PaaS for ways of extending their cloudbased applications through integrations with other applications as well as addition of new services. Current IaaS users are looking at ways to increase the productivity of their cloud environments and teams to quickly deliver new cloud services. 8

9 Two Types of PaaS : Public and Private PUBLIC PAAS Companies moving to public PaaS are doing so in order to provide high availability to their customers and to gain the ability to scale their cloud-based offerings while lowering IT infrastructure spending. PRIVATE PAAS Companies considering private PaaS are primarily driven by requirements for security and the need to control and customize their environment. Some companies are considering private PaaS because their cloud architecture is evolving to a hybrid cloud and leading to a hybrid IT. 9

10 CIO should lead the initiative but must involve IT, technology and business teams a pragmatic approach is required to harness the benefits of cloud in the short term while laying a path towards high performance in the long term. 10

11 PaaS Market PaaS Market Forecast Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a fast growing market that is quickly attracting both enterprise vendors, like Microsoft, IBM, EMC/VMware and Oracle, and up-andcoming startups, to whom it offers advantages in agility, flexibility, and scalability. The PaaS global market is expected to grow from $3.8 billion in 2013 to $14 billion in 2017, according to the analyst firm IDC

12 Business Drivers of PaaS As PaaS continues to gain attention in enterprises, management teams are looking to it as a means for creating competitive advantage by: allowing them to quickly and efficiently add new features and capabilities to their applications and services; and create differentiation by integrating and bundling complementary services (mobile back-end, analytics, Big Data) Increase organization agility and efficiency 12

13 Mobile, Big Data and Analytics PaaS PROVIDER S APPROACH PaaS providers are focusing on three primary areas to address these needs and also differentiate their PaaS offerings. These areas are: mobile back-end to support the maturing mobile computing market database services to manage the variety of data types and sources for web-scale business applications business analytics to draw analytical context from data sources including social, mobile, web, and other cloudbased data sources 13

14 Many Paths to PaaS Closed Source Public Open Source Community Enterprise Private Many vendors offer PaaS some public and some private; some open-source and some closed-source; some free and unsupported, others fee-based and fully supported. Commercial PaaS offerings like Heroku have been around for some time and have seen strong adoption. Open-source PaaS offerings such as Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift have become popular due to open-source s promise of flexibility, customizability, and freedom from vendor lock-in, along with the sustained success of opensource initiatives like Linux and Java. Below is an overview of the most popular PaaS platforms from the seven most powerful vendors. Some of these vendors only offer public PaaS, while others provide options for public, private, and community based PaaS offerings. 14

15 Amazon Elastic Beanstalk Public Available as Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk (currently in beta) is Amazon s public PaaS offering. Amazon does not have private / enterprise offering. It provides a number of tools, libraries and SDKs, including toolkits for Visual Studio and Eclipse. Tools Libraries and SDKs Web Interface, CLI Tools Both web-based interface and command line interface (CLI) are available for accessing and managing the service. PaaS Authentication and Authorization: IAM, MFA Content Delivery CloudFront Processing: Elastic MapReduce Monitoring: CloudWatch Workforce: Mechanical Turk Payment: DevPay, FPS Deployment and Automation: Elastic Beanstalk, Cloud Formation SES Messaging: SNS, SQS Elastic Beanstalk is built on top of Amazon s IaaS platform and leverages other AWS services like Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), database services, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), etc. Elastic Beanstalk provides services for Authentication and Authorization, Monitoring and also deployment and automation service through it s Cloud Formation. IaaS Compute: EC2 Storage: S3 Database: RDS Network : VPC, Elastic LB Support for mobile back-end for Android and IOS is available. Several programming frameworks, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js,.Net and Docker., as well as common server types such as Apache HTTP, Apache Tomcat, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS. Elastic Beanstalk is currently free; however, you pay for the AWS resources (IaaS) that store and run your applications. 15

16 Salesforce force.com and Heroku Available as Public Salesforce currently has two separate public PaaS offerings: touch.salesforece.com force.com CHATTER SALES SERVICE RADIAN 6 APP-EX DATABASE.COM OPEN API force.com and Heroku. Salesforce does not offer a private PaaS option. Force.com is targeted at users building simple applications based on data already in the salesforce.com cloud. These are typically employee apps that require a simple and prescriptive way to build a new service or application. DATA.COM Heroku is suitable for building custom applications based on modern language frameworks like Java, Ruby, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python and PHP. 16

17 Microsoft Azure Available as Public and Private APPLICATION SERVICES: Pinpoint, Dallas FRAMEWORKS: Server AppFabric SECURITY: AppFabric CONNECTIVITY: AppFabric DATA: SQL Azure COMPUTE: Windows Azure STORAGE App Market Place, Personal Data Repos Marketplace Services Hosting, Workflow Hosting, Distributed Cache Access, Identity, Federated ID, Secure Token, Policies Service Bus : On-Premise Bridging, Composite Apps. Relational db, ODBC, ADO.NET, Trans-SQL, Data Sync Language Frameworks:.NET, Java, Ruby, Win32, VHD Unstructured Data, Blobs, Message Q, Dist. FS, Cont Dist. Microsoft is a recent entrant in this market, but their evolving offerings are quickly becoming one of the most comprehensive suites of cloud services, making Azure an attractive platform for enterprises. Windows Azure is a very comfortable environment to the millions of.net developers and Windows ISVs. Azure now includes support for applications developed using other programming languages as well, including Java, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, MySQL, and other environments, thus significantly increasing its potential customer base and addressable market. Windows Azure s position is further strengthened by Microsoft s popular SaaS offerings, including Dynamics CRM, Office 365, and Sharepoint, and by its large customer, partner, and developer base. Together, these factors give Microsoft a powerful presence in the overall cloud and PaaS market. 17

18 Google App Engine Public PaaS Available as SDKs Languages and Runtimes Data Management Authentication Monitoring and notification Lifecycle Management OS Tools Auto scaling, load balancing, Search Monitoring, Queues, Memcache App Engine is Google s PaaS platform for developing and hosting web applications. Google s other cloud service platforms include Compute Engine (IaaS) and Google Apps (SaaS). App Engine provides auto-scaling and supports applications like Python, Java, PHP, Go, and MySQL. Google claims an installed base of over 30,000 paying customers, but this figure mostly includes small companies: only a few larger companies are currently using App Engine. Two factors make App Engine an attractive option for larger enterprises: Platform s ability to process large amounts of unstructured data and IaaS Compute Engine The claim that Google s own internal IT runs on it. To remove obstacles for enterprise adoption, Google is adding support options and new capabilities, such as increased availability, support for Rational database, and support for popular frameworks such as Spring (for its Java App Engine). App Engine is available for free, on a limited-resources basis. Fees are charged for additional storage, bandwidth, or computing resources. As the adoption of Google Apps, Google s enterprise SaaS offering, increases, integration between Google Apps and App Engine will make App Engine an even stronger contender in this market. 18

19 Red Hat - OpenShift Available as Public and Private Red Hat is best known for its open-source Linux OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). OpenShift is Red Hat s PaaS offering, available in three versions: Public (OpenShift Online), Private (OpenShift Enterprise), and a Community version (OpenShift Origin). Because OpenShift uses the same codebase for all three offerings, it provides the choice and flexibility to deploy applications on bare metal or virtualized infrastructure, private cloud or public cloud. Using the concept of secure containers (GEARS), it provides a multi-tenant environment with interchangeable and extensible cartridges for middleware and programming languages. OpenShift runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and provides support for popular development tools like Jenkins, Maven, Git, etc. It supports a variety of application programming languages, including Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and Perl, and includes databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and others. OpenShift Online has a free version for up to 3 GEARS. The Bronze version starts free for up to 16 GEARS, but add-ons carry additional fees. 19

20 Cloud Foundry CloudFoundry.org Available as Private Routing Authentication Application Lifecycle Application Storage and Execution Router OAuth2 Server (UAA) Cloud Controller Application Execution (DEA) Warden Login Server Health Manager Blob Store Cloud Foundry is an open-source cloud computing PaaS. Cloud Foundry, was developed by VMware and in 2011 was announced as open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. In February 2014, VMware spun off Pivotal and announced the formation of Cloud Foundry Foundation ( with Pivotal, EMC, IBM, Rackspace, and VMware as Platinum members. The foundation has since expanded to 33 members and 42 contributing companies, including HP, GE, SAP, Intel, Verizon, and NTT. Services Messaging Metrics and Logging Service Brokers Message Bus (NATS) Metrics Collector App Log Aggregator Cloud Foundry is a multi-cloud technology that can run in a private infrastructure or on a public cloud and can be used to build large-scale data services. Several Foundation members, including IBM, HP, and Pivotal, have released their own distributions of Cloud Foundry and have built public PaaS offerings. We have included Cloud Foundry in this document because of its growing popularity as an open-source PaaS offerings and many large vendors are building their offerings with Cloud Foundry. 20

21 IBM - Bluemix Public Available as Router User Authentication and Authorization Cloud Controller Health Manager Service Gateway DEA Pool Service Nodes Apps Service Connector Build Packs Messaging SOFTLAYER (IaaS) Bluemix is IBM s open-cloud-architecture implementation of the Cloud Foundry PaaS. It runs on top of IBM s Softlayer IaaS. Bluemix was announced early this year and, as a relatively new platform, understandably lacks certain key features and capabilities. Its current features include Git for a repository, a built-in web integrated development environment (IDE), and integration with other popular development tools such as Eclipse and Visual Studio. It supports applications developed in Java, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and PHP. Bluemix is a public PaaS and currently does not offer a private version. This is likely to leave out a large segment of enterprise customers that need to keep their data within their private data centers. The Bluemix environment currently does not offer high-productivity tools for developing cloud-native applications, and therefore it requires professional software engineering skills, which leaves it less attractive to the fastgrowing small-and-medium-size business and line-ofbusiness (LOB) application market. The success of Bluemix will depend on attracting SaaS ISVs and large enterprises with private PaaS needs. We consider IBM to be a potentially powerful player in this arena, because of IBM s reach and its large existing enterprise customer base (through IBM services). 21

22 Pivotal Pivotal CF Available as Public and Private Pivotal is a recent arrival in the PaaS space as a commercial venture. In November 2013, VMware spun off Pivotal just before it announced the formation of Cloud Foundry Foundation. Pivotal has two Cloud Foundry PaaS offerings: a hosted version, Pivotal Web Services Suite, and an enterprise private PaaS, Pivotal CF. Pivotal CF can run on top of either VMware vsphere, OpenStack, or Amazon Web Services. While it is not clear how Pivotal is packaging these offerings, it seems that Pivotal CF ships as an integrated package named Pivotal One, which includes three other services: Pivotal HD, which includes a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), MapReduce, HAWQ SQ, YARN, and GemFire XD analytics. Pivotal RabbitMQ Services, an asynchronous messaging broker Pivotal MySQL Services, a multi-tenant, single instance MySQL It is not clear whether Mobile Services Suite (from Pivotal s recent acquisition of Xtreme Labs) is bundled in or not, but we expect that to be included soon. If Pivotal executes well, it has the potential to be a significant player in the PaaS market because of its relationship with VMware and EMC and because it is part of the EMC Federation. 22

23 Top PaaS Offering Comparison Company PaaS Name Source Code Programming Frameworks Amazon Google IBM Microsoft Pivotal Red Hat Elastic Beanstalk (Public) Closed Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js,.Net Google App Engine (Public) Closed Python, Java, PHP, Go, Spring MySQL Bluemix (Public) Windows Azure (Public and Private) Pivotal CF (Public and Private) OpenShift (Public and Private) Open (Cloud Foundry) Closed Open (Cloud Foundry) Open (OpenShift) Java, Node.js, JavaScript, Python, Ruby and PHP Java, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Javascript Java, Javascript, Ruby, Scala Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Phython, Perl Other Available Services Docker, Apache HTTP, Apache Tomcat, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS, MySQL MySQL, integration with Microsoft Office, CRM and Sharepoint Pivotal Hadoop, RabbitMQ, MySQL, Mobile Service Suite (planned) MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL Salesforce Force.com (Public) Closed Apex Heroku (Public) Closed Java, Ruby, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Phyton and PHP Business Logic, integration with salesforce.com 23

24 Teams responsible for IT cloud strategy should not expect that industry standards or mega-vendors offerings alone would provide a complete and consistent cloud experience. 24

25 How to Choose The Right PaaS? PaaS can turn out to be more of a problem than a solution. As we showed above, PaaS software and services are available from multiple vendors, each offering its own models, technologies, portals, services, and management systems. Often the selection of a PaaS is opportunistic, driven by pressures to quickly deliver a specific business initiative. But a decision made solely to extend existing offerings, or to demonstrate a new service, can be short-sighted. If it ends up saddling your IT organization with the need to manage inconsistent and redundant technologies and services, a PaaS can turn out to be more of a problem than a solution. On the other hand, choosing the right PaaS can be a key factor in positioning your IT Infrastructure as an asset within your organization. The right PaaS will: maximize the productivity and agility of your developers and IT team, and allow you to quickly and effectively respond to business and market needs. 25

26 Choosing The Right PaaS For Your Organization To aid your decision process for choosing the most suitable PaaS for your business, we have provided the following checklists to help you assess your needs and the possible business impacts of a PaaS. 26

27 # 1 Development Environment and Tools Flexibility A flexible set of tools allows developers to choose the best environment for a project and allows optimal use of the developers skill sets and expertise. But while an open-source PaaS solution will provide more flexibility, it will also result in added complexity for support Tools and Development Environment Scale 1 to 10 1 Allow programming in various languages? On a scale of 1 to 10, How important is the PaaS s ability to: 2 Choices of development frameworks? 3 Support multiple application development environments? 4 Separate environments for different application development lifecycle stages: development, test, staging and production? 5 Use different types of cloud infrastructure? 27

28 # 2 Security and Multi-tenancy A PaaS platform should provide the ability to secure your application and IT infrastructure and to isolate subscribers from one another and from the providers of the cloud services. Your answers to the following questions can help prioritize your goals relating to security and multi-tenancy. Tools and Development Environment Scale 1 to 10 1 Multi-tenancy for your users of the PaaS Service? On a scale of 1 to 10, How important is: 2 Security from malicious users? 3 Testing and analysis of code vulnerabilities? 4 An environment that provides security through the entire stack? 28

29 # 3 Application Portability Many large organizations have a plethora of existing applications, many of which were developed for on-premise deployments and single tenants. These applications need to be transformed in order to integrate with or migrate to a cloud infrastructure. Other organizations need to migrate their applications from one cloud environment to another for various reasons, including technology and business needs. Your answers to the following questions can help prioritize your goals related to maintaining control of your environments and applications during and after migration. Application Portability Scale 1 to 10 1 Ability to move applications between on-premise and cloud environments? On a scale of 1 to 10, How important is: 2 Ability to port legacy applications to a (new) cloud environment? 3 Ability to adopt or implement PaaS without changing current methodologies? 4 Freedom from vendor lock-in? 29

30 # 4 Leveraging Existing Investments Many organizations have already made investments in cloud services and have existing infrastructure. Moreover, the ability to leverage the existing knowledge base and expertise of developers and IT teams is often vital. Your answers to the following questions can help prioritize your goals related to compatibility with your existing assets. Existing Investments and Future Choices Scale 1 to 10 1 Support your existing tools and languages? On a scale of 1 to 10, How important is: 2 Leverage the existing skills and expertise of your current developers? 3 Leverage or replace your existing platform and data security capabilities? 4 5 Manage the variety of virtualization technologies in your existing environments? Easily leverage and integrate your existing knowledge base and environments? 30

31 Other PaaS Companies Besides the platforms described in this white paper, several other commercial PaaS offerings are available in the market, including AppFog, Cloudbees, Engine Yard, HP, Software AG (LongJump), ActiveState (Stackato) and others. Each has its own advantages in terms of support for language, middleware, and programming frameworks. 31

32 Conclusion Over the coming years, businesses will move toward PaaS in a multitude of ways. A one-size-fits-all approach for PaaS providers will be unsustainable. Companies will need to adopt a PaaS model of some sort to be competitive and to bring agility and increased productivity to their development and IT teams. The question will be: Which PaaS model? An optimal choice of a PaaS should take into account a company s goals, existing infrastructure, in-house expertise, and other concerns. Answering the questions in the Checklists provided in this document should help you identify and prioritize these factors, which is the first step in the decision-making process. 32

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