Guide to cloud formations - Why PaaS up a good opportunity?

The PaaS market is huge, and Gartner predicts it will become a ubiquitous solution for hosting application platforms

In March this year, analyst firm Gartner declared that 2011 would be the year of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It predicted that all leading enterprise software vendors and cloud specialists would introduce new PaaS offerings, and that the “key PaaS segments will engulf the software industry”.

PaaS refers to the middle layer of the software stack, and it is the technology that negotiates between the underlying infrastructure and the overlaying application software.

“PaaS is simply an offering that provides enterprises with an externally hosted self-service application platform for building and running applications and services,” says Richard Watson, research director at Gartner.

“To be considered part of the PaaS market you have got to be able to provision a full application platform for developers to load code onto.

“The PaaS market is enormous. The major players include Microsoft with its Azure platform, Google with its App Engine, SalesForce.com with Force.com, and Amazon with its Elastic Beanstalk offering. A lot of niche companies and traditional middleware players are also vying to get into this market.”

Retailer Asos tests the cloud

Dan West, IT director for online fashion retailer Asos, has completed writing an application programming interface (API) into Microsoft’s Azure platform. The API is being used in a mobile application the company released this summer.

“I wanted to take a non-mission-critical application first to try PaaS, and the mobile app was a good opportunity to trial it to see how it could work,” says West.
“It wasn’t an existing application that we had to transition and migrate to the cloud, and so it made sense to start with a brand new initiative.”

Although the API is Asos’ first attempt at PaaS, West also had the Asos.com web site running as a proof of concept within the Azure cloud.

“The proof of concept is working very well. The benefits for us are all about global scale, speed to market, resilience and having a worldwide presence. However, we have to build confidence and trust in the platform before we allow the external public onto it,” explains West.

Asos hopes PaaS will allow the e-commerce site to reach global markets at a much faster rate than previously possible, and for applications to be easily scalable. Asos’ infrastructure currently sits in the UK, and West suggests that with growing international traffic this does not support a good customer experience because data requests will have to be relayed back to its local datacentre.

Microsoft’s Azure has regional hubs around the world, which consequently allows applications to be written into the cloud and then distributed internationally. West says this should improve latency and resilience.

Rob Bryant, partner at consulting firm Deloitte, suggests that global distribution of applications is a huge benefit for companies looking to move to PaaS.

Guide to cloud formations - Why PaaS up a good opportunity?

The PaaS market is huge, and Gartner predicts it will become a ubiquitous solution for hosting application platforms

“Companies often find that applications are developed in specific global markets, and then stay in those global markets. Now a regional division can say it has built an application in France, and that asset can then quickly be deployed in Mexico,” says Bryant.

“There has definitely been both a ubiquity and ease of deployment driver with PaaS.”

Flexibility and security

However, despite scale and ease of access to global markets, Deloitte suggest that some enterprises will still not opt for PaaS because of fears about security and flexibility. “One of the core barriers to adoption is security. If you think of PaaS as a multi-tenant environment, then you are always going to have questions about whether there are appropriate security controls for confidentiality, integrity and privacy of data,” says Bhavesh Morar (pictured above), senior manager at Deloitte’s technology group.

“The other main challenge a lot of suppliers face is ensuring they provide organisations with the flexibility to be able to develop applications in any programming language or development methodology.

“A lot of services can be proprietary in nature, which means organisations can be restricted in terms of the applications that can be developed with any particular vendor.”

West agrees that security is a concern for Asos and says the company would never place customer data in the cloud. However, West argues that, for Asos, flexibility hasn’t been a contributing factor, as he describes the company as a “Microsoft house”. West insists the “transition from on-premise to off-premise has been very smooth because it purely uses Microsoft’s .Net code framework”.

Watson says PaaS will always face the most resistance from enterprises, as it is the most complex to use because of the level of code manipulation that is required. “The cloud can be described in five verbs – rehost, refactor, revise, rebuild and replace.

Rehosting is when an enterprise takes an application and forklifts it onto another hosting environment; for example, Amazon’s public cloud. The value proposition for this is that you don’t have to change the application code or architecture – you are just shifting it,” says Watson.

“On the other end of the scale, you have replace, which is when companies replace applications with Software-as-a-Service. This is easy. At a stroke you retire an application that has cost a fortune to maintain.

“In the middle, there is refactor, revise and rebuild, which are associated with PaaS. These involve cracking open the code, rebuilding the application, and then adopting new frameworks and languages. The business case for doing this is less clear than the other two options, because rehost and replace are just easier.”