CLOUD PIER FACILITATING TODAY S PAAS ADOPTION AND PREPARING FOR TOMORROW S MULTI-CLOUD DEMAND

CLOUD PIER FACILITATING TODAY S PAAS ADOPTION AND PREPARING FOR TOMORROW S MULTI-CLOUD DEMAND

Cloud s Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a novel, rapidly growing segment in the cloud computing market that enables software developers to create (develop or integrate), deploy, execute, and manage business applications, using a service provided by a third party. This is of significant value to independent software vendors (ISVs) that are looking to sell SaaS modeled services in the cloud, as well as large enterprises to improve internal development. PaaS brings them a streamlined development ecosystem and an accessible entry point to the Cloud. But while PaaS is the quickest expanding area of the cloud, certain key shortcomings still prevent potential adopters from fully exploiting it. PaaS solutions are full of innovation but far from consistent, and the variety of platforms is much more difficult to compare than its IaaS cousin. If and when that initial adoption is made, platform vendor lock-in remains a chief concern, where application portability is substantially more complex than switching infrastructures. Cloud Pier, a multi-paas application management system, is an open source solution that focuses on enabling interoperability and portability between PaaS offerings to alleviate several of these shortcomings. Developed by the EU co-funded FP7 research project, Cloud4SOA, Cloud Pier empowers the cloud application developer of any profile, from the SME looking to deploy and manage their new SaaS on a public PaaS, or a large IT-oriented enterprise looking to streamline internal development and testing between several private and hybrid platforms. Even PaaS providers themselves can use its assets to help catch up with the trends that are arriving soon to the cloud landscape. This whitepaper will provide you an overall look at Cloud Pier, the market drivers that call for such a solution, and how both developers and providers within cloud computing s PaaS segment can leverage the open source technology to their advantage.

INTRODUCING CLOUD PIER Let s start with the basic question, what is Cloud Pier? Cloud Pier provides an integrated, open source multi-paas application management system with four core capabilities delivered to the developer via an innovative user interface (GUI) and command line (CLI) support: Matchmaking allows searching among existing PaaS offerings via Cloud Pier s platform profiles, analyzing the developer s application requirements and preferences to lead them to the most suitable platform match. Management supports efficient deployment and governance of applications on various PaaS offerings, leveraging Cloud Pier s harmonized API and platform-specific adapters. Monitoring provides application and platform monitoring based on unified, provider-independent metrics and user-defined SLA policies. Migration supports portability of an application and its data between cloud platforms that use the same underlying technology (e.g. two vendors and/or platforms for Java, for PhP, for Python, etc.).

For the developer, these are value-added capabilities that facilitate the discovery and application lifecycle in the PaaS offering that best matches their computational needs, as well as facilitating application portability to alleviate today s vendor lock-in. For vendors, Cloud Pier technology can help enable interoperable scenarios and new collaborative business models to PaaS solutions, fostering a competitive advantage for platforms in anticipation of an up and coming trend. Cloud Pier's platform adapters form a bridge between its unified API and those of several PaaS

A SOLUTION FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW S PAAS SEGMENT Why is now the right moment to introduce solutions like Cloud Pier? From large ISVs to SME developers, and even individual freelancers, PaaS adoption is growing exponentially. The 451 PaaS by 2016 = 4.7bn Group reports that PaaS accounted for almost 25% of the total revenue from cloud computing solutions in 2012. Technavio sees massive growth, as well, with both analysts predicting between 42% to 50% CAGR (compound annual growth rate), the fastest expanding segment of cloud computing (451 Group), towards upwards of 4.7bn EUR (Technavio) by 2016. This eclipses even Gartner s previous estimates in 2011 of reaching 2.9bn EUR for the same year; PaaS is growing exponentially. However, the PaaS segment varies greatly, where a platform heterogeneity constantly evolving taxonomy has grown in recent years. Such diversity can be found in technologies and languages (java, PHP,.NET, etc.); levels of abstraction (productivity vs. control); services and toolsets (proprietary and third-party); deployment (public vs. private); and even the scope of offering and background of the provider (e.g. a PaaS dedicated to a certain SaaS, or an IaaS offering a layer above). This heterogeneity of today s existing PaaS offerings raises several interoperability challenges, and also makes it difficult for developers to identify the platform that best fits their needs. Furthermore, today s PaaS market segment is still fairly young (even in cloud computing s lifetime) presenting a vendor lock-in chaotic, highly fragmented landscape and dominated by a few providers which use and promote incompatible standards and formats. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and software from one PaaS to another, locking software developers to the first provider they use. Developers indeed require more flexibility in migration, particularly when application requirements change or vendor policies begin to drift. Even on the vendor side, the very same lock-in is greatly limiting the entry of new PaaS providers with innovative offerings, due to the high switching costs that their competition s customers have before them. Challenges in interoperability also bring complexity to the scenarios of the near future, such as hybrid, bursting, brokerage and federation. Gartner predicts that by 2017 half of large enterprises will have hybrid deployments, a trend that points to future demand of more application governance solutions between clouds. The current state of the PaaS landscape is therefore far from a global arena open to every player. Reducing the interoperability and portability barriers between different platforms and vendors constitutes an important step for realizing a more dynamic potential of cloud computing.

Challenges in PaaS Supply and Demand Cloud Pier looks towards the above shortcomings for both the consumption and provision of cloud computing s PaaS: Cloud Developers, the primary target of Cloud Pier deployments, is the umbrella term we use for the wide range of PaaS customers, including both SME and large enterprise developers & ISVs, service providers, and supporting IT services, where the latter sometimes overlaps with the provision side of private platforms. Cloud Providers, the secondary target of Cloud Pier technology, is the vendor-side term we use for public PaaS providers (and expanding IaaS providers), private PaaS vendors, and add-on services. Problems to Solve in Demand (Cloud Application Development on PaaS): Difficulty to compare: Developers of all sizes have difficulty comparing competitive offerings due to their diversity and fragmentation, more so than, for example, IaaS, where a more direct infrastructure-based comparison on compute and storage can be made. Vendor lock-in: Even after finding the right PaaS, the chief adoption barrier of vendor lock-in remains, creating a prohibitive switching cost after heavy investment towards one vendor in particular. It s a risk that scales with the developer s size and investment, from SME to large enterprise, and limits their flexibility towards best-fit cloud solutions. Complexity in adopting multiple cloud solutions: The cloud computing market is diversifying not just in alternative choices, but also the mix and matching of best-in-breed solutions for custom stacks and advanced scenarios of various interconnected infrastructures and platforms. The importance of application governance and monitoring in such heterogeneity grows with this trend, and while established choices exist on the IaaS layer, PaaS customers lack proper tools to management multiple deployments between various platforms, including larger ISVs for internal development and IT Services that integrate such multi-vendor solutions for clients. Problems to Solve in Supply (Platform Provision): Conflicts in interoperability prevent advanced scenarios: The phenomenon applies to providers, as well. Such scenarios as hybrid, bursting and federation are re-opening the call for stronger open standards. Although standardization in cloud computing is often criticized for being too slow of a process for such a quickly moving market, minimal standards in APIs and basic management can make a key impact to resolving interoperability conflicts. Platforms competitive advantages hindered by fragmentation and first-mover dominance: PaaS provision can be a realistic endeavor for start-ups, more so than IaaS (e.g. can outsource to an external infrastructure, saving on CapEx). Yet their entry and ability to compare & contrast against current first-mover leaders is hindered not only due to larger marketing resources, but also the difficulty to leverage their platforms competitive advantages in such a fragmented segment where customers don t know what to expect as the baseline.

Different risks result in different importance to cloud developers and providers alike. The following table provides a heat chart that has helped position Cloud Pier towards its potential adopters. For example, scenarios have a greater effect on larger companies with larger cloud strategies. Likewise, established first-mover providers with a significant lead over competition have little or nothing to gain from a solution to vendor lock-in. Certain problems are universal, such as interoperability as a barrier from better scenarios. Priorities to Solve in Cloud s PaaS Segment (from Developer and Provider point of view) Developer: Comparison Discovery Portability Multi-Cloud Provider: Market Entry & Competition Vendor Lock-In Developer: Multi-Cloud Management Provider: Interoperability SMEs Medium Developers Integrators Providers Large Enterprise Supporting IT Services Emerging PaaS Established PaaS & IaaS High High Low High Medium Low High High Shortcomings to Solve in PaaS Supply (Provision) and Demand (SaaS Development)

How does Cloud Pier help alleviate these challenges? By helping to alleviate these challenges, Cloud Pier can bring value to a variety of stakeholders in the PaaS segment: Application Developers & Service Providers PaaS Demand app management suite for their SaaS Large Enterprise, Integrators and IT Support Services management of in-house development & testing between platforms Cloud Platform Vendors PaaS Supply interconnection of platforms to prepare for multicloud scenarios PaaS Demand Find and compare the best PaaS for your application in a fragmented market of difficult-to-compare cloud solutions. pre-defined platform profiles to search and browse the best optimized PaaS based on your application s requirements, such as technology, functionality, capacity, development support, pricing, SLAs and quality of service goes beyond the typical search engine that would base results on the providers marketing or SEO and instead brings independently verified provider info Reduce operational overhead with application management featuring simple governance, dashboard monitoring, unified metrics and user-defined SLA policies between platforms. a full multi-paas manager that covers the complete application lifecycle, either via a graphical (GUI) or common line interface (CLI) developer gains streamlined app governance between platforms (public or private), while never losing out on the innovative features back at the PaaS offering or its 3rdparty ecosystem uniformed metrics across all deployed applications, such as latency and status, allowing to compare and contrast between applications performance across platforms integrated system for application service-level monitoring lets the developer know how their pre-defined SLA criteria are keeping up

Alleviate vendor lock-in and lower switching costs. true PaaS portability solution that alleviates vendor lock-in, letting the developer migrate both their application and data between platforms of the same underlying technology (e.g. Java to Java, PHP to PHP) allows the developer to re-evaluate their initial choice based on criteria of geography, quality of service, cost, platform-specific tools, or sustainability of the provider PaaS Supply Added visibility channel for smaller Cloud PaaS provider. Cloud Pier provides a Lighthouse to find services that were once dwarfed by the marketing efforts of established first-mover competition Smaller providers can be found by their customers based on objective requirements, and niche competitive advantages can be better leveraged Enabling scenarios for providers. Allows providers to integrate some of Cloud Pier s features into their own PaaS offering, and help enable scenarios with other platforms or even fellow providers Cloud Pier is completely open-source (Apache) and available on GitHub, from its Platform Adapters to its core components Standards Ready (and no-standards Ready) Cloud Pier s founding project Cloud4SOA is a member of the CAMP platform management working group, and shares a vision that even in the platform layer there is room for basic, lite standards, while still celebrating the innovative & differentiating features that form the competitive advantages of PaaS offerings but Cloud Pier also offers an alternative for the short and mid-term: leveraging its own unified API and those of supported PaaS solutions. It s an interoperability and portability solution that works today.

Comparative Solutions Cloud Pier is an innovative suite of PaaS-facilitating solutions and a result of research into cloud platform interoperability and application portability. However, hints of its core features can be found in a variety of existing first-mover solutions. Offering Capabilities name class matchmaking management monitoring migration RightScale manager (IaaS) 1 enstratus manager (IaaS) Kaavo manager (IaaS) Sirocco Appsecute manager (IaaS) manager (PaaS CloudFoundryonly) 2 3 Deltacloud API (IaaS) CompatibleOne API (IaaS, Paas) CloudFoundry PaaS+ 4 StandingCloud PaaS+ 1 This year RightScale has expanded to limited matchmaking in the form of a pricing calculator, called Plan for the Cloud 2 Sirocco s matchmaking is focused to SLAs 3 Appsecute supports migration between CloudFoundry platform implementations, and was acquired in 2013 by ActiveState (vendor of Stackado private PaaS) 4 PaaS+ signifies that the offering is a platform-as-a-service, but relevant to Cloud Pier in comparing the PaaS s interaction at the infrastructure layer (e.g. featuring a relatively easy change of infrastructure below platform)

Offering Capabilities name class matchmaking management monitoring migration NewRelic NimSoft ManageEngine Up Time Software Server Density Cloudability monitor (IaaS) monitor (IaaS) monitor (IaaS) monitor (IaaS) monitor (IaaS) monitor (IaaS) 5 Cloudorado SpotCloud aggregator (IaaS) clearinghouse (IaaS) Comparative Solutions to Cloud Pier's Core Features 5 Cloudability is a cost-focused monitor

DEPLOYING CLOUD PIER Cloud Pier is meant to accompany the PaaS experience, not replace it. The PaaS segment leverages their differentiation and unique features of each platform. Therefore, as seen in the value chain, Cloud Pier, whether local or an as-a-service deployment, delivers its value in parallel to the PaaS solution(s) it facilitates to the developer. As a fully open-source solution, the value of Cloud Pier can be delivered in a variety of deployment and business models. Below are such scenarios in which an adopter can take full advantage of Cloud Pier technology. Cloud Pier as a Service Cloud Pier as a local Multi-Cloud Manager Cloud Pier features as Add-On Services Cloud Pier as an Interoperability API Cloud Pier can be delivered as an online SaaS service for its valueadded capabilities in matchmaking, management, monitoring and migration. Lighthouse, a proof of concept of this model focusing on the matchmaking feature of Cloud Pier, is available today. Ideal for: providing to SME vendors with a SaaS solution Cloud Pier and its Platform Adapters, available on GitHub today, can be downloaded and implemented locally for a fully featured open-source manager. Ideal for: larger IT software & services who wish to streamline their internal development, management and testing between several private, public or hybrid platforms. Cloud vendors can implement and offer Cloud Pier s features as add-on services to their own cloud solutions, such as its governance, unified monitoring, SLA policy management and application & data portability. Ideal for: public and private cloud vendors, and service providers. Cloud vendors of PaaS solutions can leverage Cloud Pier s unified API & Platform Adapters and develop bridges that expand to other cloud solutions for scenarios and larger ecosystems of add-ons and services. Ideal for: public and private cloud vendors.

CLOUD PIER AVAILABILITY Cloud Pier s open-source technology is available today! Cloud Pier Open-Source As the full integration of its core components and platform adapters, Cloud Pier is an opensource solution more oriented towards larger ISVs and integrators that can download and install Cloud Pier locally as a manager. Cloud Pier technology can also be integrated by cloud vendors to help add value to their offering, such as its harmonized API and adapters for scenarios and larger ecosystems. Cloud Pier Open Source focuses on the management, monitoring and migration, rather than the initial matchmaking functionality that benefits from a centralized repository of platform profiles, although one can be created and hosted locally, and initial PaaS profiles created by the Cloud4SOA research project are available, with more on the way. Cloud Pier s Lighthouse The partners of the Cloud4SOA research project are also delivering Cloud Pier via an as-a- Service deployment, Lighthouse, initially focusing solely on matchmaking: the search and discovery of platforms via the developer s application and PaaS requirements. Lighthouse shares characteristics between a marketplace and an online manager.

Cloud Pier is an open source solution to accompany and facilitate today s PaaS adoption, and extendable for tomorrow s demands. Now with an idea of Cloud Pier s potential, visit our website to try it out on both the Lighthouse cloud application/platform matchmaking online service, as well as the full local implication of the multi-paas application manager available on GitHub. www.opencloudpier.org Cloud Pier is a result of the EU co-funded FP7 research project, Cloud4SOA (Grant 257953)