Enterprise best practices for PaaS cloud computing and development
Platform as a Service (PaaS) development, like any emerging technology, requires standards, best practices and for those considering it for their enterprise. This expert E-Guide will explore the potential of PaaS development and provide expert tips for incorporating PaaS into your cloud strategy. By: Adam Riglian Working on the technology frontier is surely thrilling for those involved, but it s also a difficult environment without standards or rules. Platform as a Service (PaaS) development is on that frontier. It is a relatively young area of cloud computing, one that is still being evangelized by vendors and studied by developers and business decision makers. It has the potential to be a force in the cloud economy, but is also an enigma at this point, largely misunderstood in part due to aggressive cloudwashing. With any emerging technology, there are calls to create a set of standards, best practices and around it. It has not happened formally with PaaS cloud computing yet, but there are plenty of people working in the field who are willing to offer their own advice on how to use PaaS in the enterprise. Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst with Rishidot Research and a cloud computing author, has plenty of advice for developing s with PaaS. At the top of the list: Make sure to build s for the cloud. Make it more compartmentalized, make it more modular and develop your apps in that way, Subramanian said. That will let you take advantage of the distributed nature of the cloud. Page 2 of 7
Exploring PaaS development potential He added that a lot is still misunderstood about PaaS cloud computing in the developer community and plenty of evangelizing and educating work remains. That education is twofold -- explaining how PaaS works and how to develop s for the cloud. Subramanian believes developers need to change the way they do certain things when designing s for the cloud. He thinks developers need to not only make their s more modular, but to design them for varied performance. Build for failure, which is becoming a mantra among cloud developers, is crucial, according to Subramanian. If build for failure is a mantra, than DevOps is quickly becoming a new religion. DevOps refers to the practice of combining an IT department s development and operations to create better communication between the two and rapidly increase the speed at which s are developed and deployed. Paul Burns, an analyst with Fort Collins, Colo.-based consultancy Neovise, believes DevOps is an important part of working with PaaS cloud computing, because both the methodology and the technology are aimed at saving developers' time and removing their dependencies on the operations team. Subramanian also suggests that developers should keep their code and database simple, and find a way to store data so that it can scale. He also believes developers must look to the future and build their s with tomorrow s standards in mind. This means planning for portability and interoperability. Jeff Kaplan, managing director of Wellesley, Mass.-based consultancy THINK, believes that one of the best approaches the enterprise can take towards PaaS -- or most any cloud technology for that matter -- is to take it out for a test drive via a pilot program. The whole beauty of this business is the opportunity to pilot or incrementally invest in a SaaS app, IaaS or PaaS alternative, Kaplan said. A lot of people Page 3 of 7
who have been in the industry for a long time are frightened of making a move because they think they have to make a big bet. If there s a best practice, it s that the cloud frees you from that. By: Adam Riglian Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing service model that lets users, most often developers, rent virtualized servers and other tools used in developing, managing and testing s. Similar to Software as a Service (SaaS), PaaS is made available to users over the Internet, although in some instances PaaS software is downloaded and installed locally, making the as a service aspect of the name a misnomer. Who is involved in the Platform as a Service market? Beginning in 2011, there has been a host of vendors fighting for position in the PaaS market. While many had developed platforms before that, by the end of 2011 there were very few major technology vendors not involved in the market. Amazon, Microsoft (with its Azure product) and Google are often identified as market leaders, as is Salesforce.com. There are numerous other platforms, both major companies and independent startups, that complete the market. Examples include CloudBees, Engine Yard, Cloud Foundry, dotcloud and Apprenda. How is Platform as a Service used for cloud Platform as a Service has many uses across the cloud development lifecycle. Some have cloud integrated development environments, or IDEs, and integration with social coding networks like GitHub that allow for easy development in the cloud. Some take all the provisioning, load balancing and other menial work out of testing, and others Page 4 of 7
are geared toward moving existing s into the cloud, hiding the underlying architectural complexity. Another common use for PaaS is for rapid deployment. How is Platform as a Service implemented? One of the misnomers about PaaS is the as a service part, because many platforms are not offered that way. Some platforms are downloaded and installed on servers and then run like traditional middleware. Others are offered as a service through a browser. Implementation time obviously varies between the two, with some requiring installation and possibly help from professional services, while others are as simple as creating a log-in. How does Platform as a Service cut down on testing time? PaaS fits into the DevOps strategy of IT, eliminating the barrier between development and operations. PaaS eliminates the need to provision and build a testing environment, keeps developers from having to go to IT before running tests and, with continuous integration tools, developers can now test as they build without losing time. What is the difference between multi-language and single-language platforms? The PaaS offerings from traditional legacy vendors have been largely multilanguage, either through design or acquisition. Many of the startups have focused on one language or on minor variations of the same language. Multi-language enthusiasts argue that one enterprise will want to use different languages for different things and that some complex s are written in more than one language. Single-language evangelists believe that their platforms are deeper and offer the developer a more focused workspace. What is lock-in? Lock-in refers to the inability of customers to port their s from one platform to another. Whether s are developed with a PaaS or deployed into one, code from the platform is included in the. That makes it difficult to move s between clouds if the need arises. Page 5 of 7
Many vendors have signaled that their platforms no longer lock users in, but the technology has not necessarily changed enough to make the slogan reality. Page 6 of 7
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