These are exciting times for cloud consumers.
With an ever-increasing army of cloud service providers on the scene, consumers are spoilt for choice. IaaS has been traditionally synonym to the cloud but PaaS is now poised to become mainstream. Being a late entrant on the scene, it has some catching up to do for adoption. And it is well on its way!
Enterprises after being few years on IaaS have tested cloud and realized the benefits it offers. They are now opening up to PaaS and exploring the possibilities of optimizing their cloud investments. Their IaaS provider becomes a natural choice for PaaS and that’s where these public cloud players like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google score over ONLY PaaS providers such as CloudFoundry, Pivotal, OpenStack etc.
The other segment of PaaS adopters are the startups. With the mission of controlling cash burn and race against time to go-to-market, investing and managing infrastructure is the last thing these new age entrepreneurs are prepared to spend their resources on. With so many services on PaaS at disposal, most of noncore business specific jobs are being taken away from development efforts. Services such as digital marketing, email/SMS, Scheduling, calling etc are just needed to be plugged into the app with the help of easy to use APIs and the job is done. And being cloud it also brings the core benefits like scalability and availability.
DevOps is another force which is driving the adoption of these services. All once painstakingly complicated activities are now being provided as services. Right from provisioning of multiple environments, setting them up, continuous integration, automated testing, and reporting, app usage analytics, scaling up/down, load balancing and so many other things are extremely easily manageable with PaaS. That gives developers plenty of time to do what they do best – Code!
PaaS scene has been busy over the last couple of years and a lot of excitement is in store for another year or so. With the emergence of new players bringing innovative approach on one side and biggies fighting it out to secure pole position on the other, the game of consolidation is on. Enjoy watching it if you are just a follower, benefit from it if you are a consumer!
