PaaS P L A T F O R M A S A S E R V I C E Powering a New Era of Business IT 2 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT Why Has PaaS Suddenly Become So Irresistible? Cloud computing services are increasingly being adopted mainstream and are an integral part of an enterprise IT strategy. In the last 12 months, adoption of platform as a service (PaaS) has increased dramatically and it is now one of the fastest grow- ing areas of all the cloud computing services. Gartner estimates a steep rise in PaaS adoption and forecasts an increase in spending to more than $2.9 billion by 2016. By 2016, Gartner estimates that every organization will run some or all of its business software on public or private PaaS. IDC also expects a sharp uptake, estimating that the worldwide PaaS market is set to increase to more than $14 billion by 2017 as organizations look to speed up application development and decrease infrastructure costs. IDC predicts that over the next four years the compound annual growth rate for PaaS will be around 30 percent. Whatever analyst statistics are used to gauge the growth and uptake of PaaS, there is no doubt that PaaS has become irresistible to organizations. This paper explores why PaaS has suddenly become so relevant as well as the opportunities and considerations associated with using PaaS from an application development and deployment perspective. This paper outlines the ways PaaS can help enhance the development process and explains how the OutSystems high-productivity PaaS offering can help supercharge application delivery teams. Gartner estimates a steep rise in PaaS adoption and forecasts an increase in spending to more than $2.9 billion by 2016. 3 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT PaaS A Perfect Storm There are a number of reasons why PaaS is experiencing fast market adoption. Today, there are compelling economics around these offerings. Not only does PaaS allow IT teams to do much more with what they have; it also reduces development time - in some instances by as much as 50 percent. Add to this the fact that the market is now maturing and you can start to see why organizations are seeking out PaaS options. Indeed, now that the cloud market has matured and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) have become more or less household names in the business environment, companies are now looking into PaaS with renewed vigor. Another driver is the increased demand for custom applications in order to gain competitive advantage, especially as organizations look to innovate and get ahead as we climb out of the recession. With the goal of getting quality applications to market faster, we have also seen a rise in the need for and focus on DevOps. DevOps represents a cultural shift in how business requirements are turned into software. The fundamental goal of this culture is to simultaneously and significant- ly increase the velocity and quality of software releases. These goals are directly aligned with the fundamental mission of PaaS done well. The result of this align- ment is that DevOps is a primary driver behind PaaS adoption within enterprises, because without the frictionless environment enabled by certain vendors in this new cloud service model, embracing DevOps is exceedingly difficult. What is PaaS? Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services logically sandwiched between SaaS and IaaS. There are various types of PaaS vendors. All typically offer application hosting, a deployment environment, and varying levels of scalability and automation. PaaS offerings may also include facilities for applica- tion design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and management, as 4 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT well as other services. In essence, PaaS is a SaaS development platform that abstracts the Fixed Application infrastructure, operating system and middle- ware to drive developer productivity. Defined Structures Using PaaS, customers can create process Singular Purpose extensions to existing apps or develop entire- UI Customizations ly new apps that meet the needs of their industry and business. PaaS offerings facilitate SaaS Extensions the deployment of applications without the Deep Customization cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software stacks - Integrations from networking and storage up through appli- Developer Services cation and web servers along with provision- APIs ing capabilities. However, the real benefits extend way beyond the low start-up costs. As you go from simple coder up to high-produc- tivity platforms (see Different PaaS for Different PaaS PaaS Requirements), more and more friction points are eliminated via operational simplification and automation. This will be explored more IaaS in the next section. Application Containers As application development teams can easily Platform, App Services become the scapegoat for failed or late App Lifecycle MGMT projects, PaaS offers a quick and flexible platform where new initiatives can be Development Tools driven forward more easily and are fast to value . Development teams then become Visual Infrastructure more receptive to the demands of the OW/MW Configuration business and over time they start to build better relationships leading to even more Network and Storage efficiency and harmony. Definition
Adapted from material presented by John Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research, on behalf of OutSystems 11.21.13. 5 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT Five Ways That PaaS Can Help Enhance the Development Process Let s look at the opportunities that PaaS creates for organizations and how it can enhance the development environment: 1 Faster access to infrastructure In a non-PaaS environment, the time to provision machines can sometimes take up to three months, which delays ROI and kills business agility. PaaS is the fastest way to build and deploy enterprise applications. It allows organizations to gets results in days and fundamentally supercharges the application development environ- ment. 2 Greater scalability The vectors of physical scalability (compute, storage, memory) and logical scalabil- ity (load balancers, databases, middleware, front-end) are difficult to provision in the traditional datacenter. PaaS automates and accelerates this process to enable real elasticity and scalability. Certain PaaS offerings take this to the next level by automating the discipline of scalable software design directly and seamlessly into the development process. 6 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT 3 Faster time to release and iterate Automating the activities outside of core design and development yields signifi- cant software release velocity. This, coupled with slashing developer cycle time from requirement to release, is a powerful productivity multiplier. Proper PaaS solutions remove otherwise oppressive but common concerns like versioning, multi-stage promotion, feedback capture, and performance instrumentation. This enables developers, IT, and business users to collaborate and iterate with impres- sive quality and speed. 4 Higher availability Cloud enables developers to easily create solutions with high-availability, which are typically difficult to provision and design on-premises. PaaS is also the perfect way for application developers to respond to new service and change requests from the business without breaking the bank. 5 Increased efficiency With reliable automation and abstraction built in to many PaaS solutions, the IT staff is released from time-consuming dull tasks allowing them to focus on high-value activities. Developers, unencumbered by the tasks they weren t happy doing to begin with, are more motivated, creative, and fast. Business users, now thrilled with newfound agility, are happier and naturally drawn closer to the process that drives the DevOps culture and innovative results. 7 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT Different PaaS for Different Requirements Different PaaS offerings are designed for different requirements. Before going down the PaaS route, an organization needs to understand what is driving them to the cloud. There are two main classifications of interest, PaaS platforms for coders and high-productivity PaaS plaforms. High-Productivity App Dev High- Productivity PaaS mBaaS High-Control DevOps (Mobile Backend PaaS as a Service) Integration in the Cloud IaaS 8 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT PaaS platforms for coders PaaS platforms for coders are designed for developers that are looking to take their existing approach and move it to the cloud. There are efficiencies to be gained by leveraging the fact that the underlying infrastructure is an always-available service that doesn t start with slow internal infrastructure requests. Often these platforms are used for deployment and scaling of existing or new custom applications that are developed in-house. In most cases, a PaaS platform for coders doesn t make the actual application development or physical coding any faster, but the process can become more streamlined and the elasticity of PaaS means that the project can more easily scale. Coder platform providers include companies like CloudBees, Microsoft Azure and EngineYard (among many others). High-productivity PaaS platforms High-productivity PaaS platforms are targeted at organizations that are looking to fundamentally accelerate their current design, develop, deploy, scale, and manage process for some or all of their applications. Usually the vendor will supply not only the stack but also the rich design environment enabling rapid creation, delivery, and ongoing change of applications. A point of difference among many of these vendors is openness. Some vendors take the approach of abstracting existing approaches in an effort to provide a simpler overall experience, while others embrace existing approaches and accelerate them. An organization s tolerance of lock-in, requirements for flexibility and need to integrate existing code are likely to be key decision factors here. The OutSystems Platform is a great example of a high-productivity PaaS solution that embraces and accelerates existing approaches. The OutSystems Platform abstracts away the complexity of conventional computer code, generating much of the routine parts of an application (in Java or C#) leaving developers free to concentrate on the high-value business logic. The OutSystems Platform enables IT departments to deliver innovative business solutions by significantly reducing the time and cost to build and modify applications, which leads to eliminating the ongoing change request backlog. 9 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT What You Need to Consider if You Are Going Down the PaaS Route There are typically five key considerations that enterprises need to take into account. These are: 1 Fit for purpose PaaS is a very generic term. There is no one-size-fits-all. Depending on your goals, one PaaS may be better than the other - the same way an on-premises BPM, ESB, high-productivity or continuous integration platform is good for some things but not as good for others. A PaaS for coders will not increase productivity if the need is to accelerate building and changing apps. It just facilitates the infrastructure provisioning piece. The first criteria in moving to PaaS should be to understand what kind of benefit is expected, what kind of applications are expected, and how each PaaS will help. 2 Ability to scale and support enterprise grade applications Many PaaS offerings are still being used for experimental purposes or small appli- cations. The marginal savings on the smaller apps is still interesting, but to bet on a particular PaaS, a full understanding of the environment is required to know what it will be like when critical apps are being built there. It is with these apps that PaaS becomes truly compelling. 10 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT 3 Application portability and vendor lock-in Whether already moving or just starting to experiment, as with any other technolo- gy, your investment must be protected in case it doesn't work out the way you expect. How quickly can one recover from a bad decision? How much time and effort has been wasted? 4 Security IaaS providers generally have better security than most organizations do in their own data centers. However, as one moves closer to the PaaS layer, security policies regarding how data is stored, secured and shared between multiple customers is not as clear. The fact is that applications are exposed to the world by default. The best strategy is to go with a PaaS that isolates one "tenant" from others, leveraging the security of the IaaS layer, not disregarding it. Every tenant should have the same level of security as a private data center would provide, and then open up from there - instead of sharing everything and relying on the PaaS (virtual/log- ic/application) layers to ensure isolation. 5 Integration Moving to the cloud does not happen overnight, and in many cases it won t make sense to move everything there. Organizations still have on-premises systems that will require integration, some quite heavily, for many years to come. Being able to securely and easily integrate with them is a critical requirement. That can take the form of an application running entirely on-premises, or perhaps one application that handles the heavy integration and data manipulation tasks on-premises thus making services available to front-end applications that leverage the ubiquitous access and elasticity of the cloud. 11 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT Conclusion It now makes more and more sense for enterprises to investigate the benefits of using PaaS. Adoption won t happen immediately, but trust and confidence will build gradually as organizations move certain aspects of their development into the cloud. PaaS gives organizations options. For example, a project may start in the cloud because it is quick and easy to fire up and multiple approvals aren t required to get the project underway. Over time development may move more and more into the cloud, or a hybrid environment may result. All of these scenarios can be seamlessly handled by the right PaaS vendor. Today PaaS is scalable, reliable and more mature. It s a viable service model compared to other more traditional options available to application development teams. It also removes a lot of the friction currently experienced between the appli- cation development team and the rest of the business. So it is really no wonder PaaS is being touted as the fastest growing area in cloud computing. OutSystems Platform OutSystems Platform High-Productivity App Dev High- Productivity PaaS mBaaS High-Control DevOps (Mobile Backend PaaS as a Service) (heroku, cloudbees) Integration in the Cloud IaaS (tibco, boomi) 12 / PaaS Powering a New Era of Business IT About OutSystems OutSystems makes it exceedingly easy for IT organisations to build, deploy and manage enterprise-class web and mobile applications helping IT deliver innova- tive business solutions fast. OutSystems is the only platform as a service (PaaS) available as a cloud, on-premises or hybrid solution that generates standard Java and .NET applications with fully automated DevOps support. Hundreds of compa- nies in 24 countries across 22 industries use the OutSystems Platform to rapidly deliver custom, mission-critical applications while improving IT productivity and reducing their change request backlog. Learn more at www.outsystems.com Share this paper on: