PaaS by Lineage

If you've ever wondered about what "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) really means, then you may find this analysis of mine useful.

The traditional NIST model of Cloud Computing shows three layers from a consumer's perspective:

Infrastructure as a Service refers to (shared and scalable) infrastructural capabilities such as compute power, storage and networking, as provided by a cloud vendor. The attributes "shared" (or "multi-tenanted") and "scalable" (or "elastic") distinguish cloud solutions from "terrestrial" alternatives. Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) are examples of IaaS.

Software as a Service refers to applications that you don't have to install on your own computers but can consume through your browser. For an individual, Gmail is the best example of SaaS, while companies can relate to SalesForce.com.

But PaaS has always been a bit of a mystery. What is a "platform", exactly? This is a rather nebulous (pardon the cloudy adjective) area between IaaS and SaaS, and appears to be defined by what the other two are not. The market segment is also still in flux and yet to mature, and there are many players here, each staking out a piece of turf and attempting to define the segment to its own advantage.

I have a high-level, vendor-neutral view of this. [Disclosure: I'm currently working for one of the PaaS vendors, WSO2.]

My preferred categorisation of the PaaS landscape is by lineage. In other words, where did the various PaaS offerings evolve from? I think this is a useful way to look at PaaS because it indicates the traditional strengths of a vendor and therefore where their PaaS offering is likely to be stronger than its competitors. Potential consumers who are looking for a particular emphasis in their PaaS solution will know which vendors are likely to meet their requirements better.

In short, I think PaaS offerings have evolved from one of three directions.

IaaS vendors like VMWare (with their vCloud IaaS) have added DevOps capability to their traditional strength and are targeting organisations that want to develop and run generic applications on the cloud. Their version of PaaS is CloudFoundry.

SaaS vendors like SalesForce.com have made their application more generic and supportive of customisation. Organisations that want to build employee-oriented applications can do so through configuration rather than coding. Their version of PaaS, which is more oriented towards a vertical segment (employee-oriented applications), is called Force.com.

A third direction from which PaaS has evolved is from traditional "terrestrial" middleware (also known as Integration or SOA products). WSO2, which has a full stack of SOA middleware products collectively referred to as Carbon, has added cloud-native features (multi-tenancy, elasticity, etc.) to its suite of products to turn them into yet another version of horizontal PaaS called Stratos. Their DevOps tools have also been upgraded to be able to deploy applications to the cloud just like they do to terrestrial servers.

The diagram below that loosely follows the NIST layering, illustrates my analysis. There may be more versions of PaaS depending on where a vendor has traditionally been based, and I will update this model as more such examples appear.