The PaaS Gold Rush

May 25, 2010 Posted on May 25, 2010 in Cloud Platforms, Featured | 0 comments

There seems to be a sudden rush to the PaaS goldmine with the recent announcements from Salesforce.com and Google to support the Spring based OpenPaaS offering from VMWare. To understand the massive implications of this , we need to peel back the layers to explore the landscape of cloud computing.
Infrastructure as a Service ( IaaS ) is getting commoditized. 4-5 years is a long time in Cloud Computing and thats how long IaaS has been around for. IaaS is essentially renting out Virtual Machines to businesses to run their applications on. The various vendors have tried to play it up by offering different flavors of it but at the end of the day , it is fast becoming as much a commodity as hardware has become. The promise of IaaS was that you can take an existing application ( on-premise) and run it as-is on the cloud without changing it much. While this might not be totally true, it worked to a large degree in many cases but the Total Cost of Ownership was not dramatically lower as promised. It starting becoming evident that unless applications are re-factored to take advantage of cloud computing, its elasticity and scale. This is where PaaS comes in….

The next frontier in Cloud Computing is clearly Platform as a Service ( PaaS ) which enables businesses to deploy “applications” on the cloud rather than move “servers” to the cloud. PaaS platforms should have the basic plumbing pieces necessary for application like persistence, workflow, identity, storage , authorization etc. Cloud Vendors like Salesforce, Amazon , Google etc are smart enough to figure out that PaaS is where the long tail of Cloud adoption is going to come from – so they are rushing to offer PaaS but there is one problem. Platforms are hard.Not every company can build platforms that are complete, compelling and sustain it version over version. Only a handful of companies truly understand how to do it and have done it for a considerable amount of time – Microsoft, IBM and to some extent Oracle ( with their BEA acquisition ) are the big ones.

But this is the cloud- the rules have to be different right ? Well, not completely. Traditional platforms are hard – Platforms on the cloud might be harder. So it is in this context , VMWare’s recent announcements of partnerships with Salesforce.com and Google are very interesting and might change the game. Until now, the biggest concern companies had with PaaS was lock in. If you wrote on Force.com or on Python to Google App Engine or to a lesser degree to the Windows Azure platform with .NET, you are stuck with that PaaS provider. There was little portability across cloud platforms.

So what did Google App Engine and VMWare announce at Google IO ?
VMWare acquired a set of Java development tools a little while ago called SpringSource which helped developers build enterprise Java applications. What VMWare announced with Salesforce.com and Google recently is that once you have a cloud application written in Java using the Spring framework, it will seamlessly run on the Google PaaS platform as well as in the Salesforce vmForce PaaS platform. so in essence, write once , run anywhere in the cloud. Wait, if you have VMWare’s vShephere internal clouds, it will even run on premise ! No lock in and full portability. Sounds great in theory but how many businesses are developing using Spring as their preferred development platform ? I would be shocked if it is even close to 5% of all Java shops. the promise of portability has never worked and I doubt if the cloud is going to be any different but it is a great marketing story !

This is just the beginning- I am positive that other Java frameworks for the cloud will emerge soon ( Are Oracle and IBM listening ? ). Microsoft on the other hand doesnt have to worry about these things. They have only only one platform to worry about -> .NET and can focus their energies on evolving the PaaS platforms rather than the development tooling and expand the lead on the PaaS market.

One thing is clear – PaaS is the next frontier in Cloud Computing. The PaaS gold rush is truly on – Who will build the next Levis Strauss in this gold rush?

-Paddy Srinivasan @Cumulux