Yesterday I asked a simple question on twitter. "If your "PaaS" (Platform as a platform) requires the deployment of Virtual machines, is it really PaaS?"
The point of my question is the line between IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS is quickly becoming blurred. What I have discovered in my various conversations with so-called PaaS vendors is automated virtual machine deployment which was previously broadly accepted as IaaS now counts as PaaS. Historically, back in those early days of cloud, PaaS was a development paradigm, a way to develop scalable cloud apps. Now many in the cloud computing sector seem to have co-op'ed the term as a deployment architecture or worse. I would argue that many so called "PaaS" offerings today are just IaaS with a few API calls removed. What some in the industry have begun calling "PaaS Washing."
Does it really matter what passes as Paas? Is there even a clear definition? According to Wikipedia "Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. Along with SaaS and IaaS, it is a service model of cloud computing. In this model, the consumer creates the software using tools and/or libraries from the provider. The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services. PaaS offerings may also include facilities for application design, application development, testing and deployment as well as services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services are generally provisioned as an integrated solution over the web."
In a recent post Brett Adam, Chief Technology Officer at rPath, a former Virtualization vendor, later IaaS vendor and recent PaaS convert explains. "We're actually very bullish about PaaS as the architecture for a lot of next generation apps. But we see true PaaS as it's been popularized in the market - you may think of it as "Silicon Valley PaaS" - is too constraining for the types of applications that enterprises depend upon today. PaaS provides a single, simple interface for deploying apps, but it dictates highly constrained requirements." Adam goes on to say, "Enterprise PaaS is a way of delivering much of the agility and economics of PaaS without full platform standardization and consolidation."
(rPath's offical description of it's Cloud Engine software is as an embedded PaaS technology that allows cloud stack vendors to extend beyond infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with PaaS-like offerings that enable rapid deployment of complex, mission-critical enterprise applications.)
Others in the industry are not buying into rPath's combination of more traditional VM-centric infrastructure life-cycle management and platform components as "Enterprise PaaS." In a blog post Krishnan Subramanian provided some of the harshest criticism, "I fully agree with their positioning that enterprises are going to take some time before they embrace distributed apps in a big way and rPath’s solution is a good fit for their short term needs. However, I DO NOT AGREE WITH THEIR PUSH THAT THEIR SYSTEM IS PAAS (Yes, I am yelling here with caps). What they are doing is offering a solution that helps with the lifecycle management 0f platforms used by enterprises for running legacy apps on elastic infrastructure. It is not PaaS. Period. No amount of justification can put this solution in the PaaS bucket. It is a clear abuse of the term PaaS for marketing purposes. PaaS is a platform that is available to build and deploy distributed applications on top of elastic infrastructure."
Without a doubt the stakes for cloud stacks are high with major PaaS offering from Salesforce, Amazon, VMware, Microsoft and RedHat all competing for a dominant position in the emerging Platform as a service sector.
Diane Mueller from PaaS vendor ActiveState provides her own spin on the debate saying, "I do think that the more complete the cloud stack is, at least in the Private Enterprise Cloud space, the more likely the Private Cloud project will be a success - thus we're going to see more IaaSes adding PaaSes into their base packages - I suspect RedHat is doing so, everyone who packages up OpenStack from PistonCloud to Enstratus is talking with us to make sure Stackato deploys seamlessly with "their" OpenStack these days. I'm betting that the term "PaaS" vanishes in a year from the market place as the layers converge."
The convergence of the various cloud descriptions and components are something I think we can probably all agree on. Personally, the distinction between IaaS, SaaS and PaaS has become fairly meaningless, much like the term cloud itself. Just don't ask me about BigData.
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