PaaS or platform as a service allows you to bring new products and services to the market faster, innovate and experiment with new technologies using cloud infrastructures.
Public cloud services are becoming more than just an alternative to your own IT infrastructure or enterprise IT services- organizations are increasingly using them as a basis for accessing new technologies, including container virtualization, distributed databases, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of things. To remain competitive, new technologies are needed to help improve operational efficiency and help create new products and services.
Most of all, cloud services are in demand by retail and wholesale trade enterprises, the financial sector and manufacturing. Public clouds accounted for 85% of all spending. Software as a Service (SaaS) leads with 59.8%, ahead of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with 29.7% and Platform as a Service (PaaS) with 10.6%.
PaaS: Market dynamics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud environment that can be used to build, test, run and manage applications. PaaS allows you to get the environment suitable for development without the hassle of buying IT systems, building, maintaining and administering your own IT infrastructure. As a result, applications can be built and released to market faster.
Tools are ready-made components of PaaS platforms that allow you to reduce time costs by several times, for example, creating and launching a fully functional website quickly without any hassle.
In fact, it is quite difficult to accurately estimate the size of the PaaS market, since a number of services, such as “containers as a service”, are sometimes classified into different segments. In addition, cloud service providers often find it difficult to allocate a share of PaaS: they provide these services as part of complex projects that also include IaaS and SaaS.
PaaS gives developers the opportunity not only to speed up the creation of applications, but also to simplify this process, for example, by provisioning and deploying applications using a single management system. A PaaS environment typically provides the entire IT resource stack as a service, including the tools needed to build and deliver applications.
According to iKS-Consulting analysts, PaaS services were practically not in demand for a long time – it was believed that these were narrow niche services intended mainly for developers, but in 2018 not only large developers, but also other customers became actively interested in PaaS.
Growth drivers
According to iKS-Consulting, the average annual growth of the PaaS market until 2022 will be 30%, and its volume by the end of this period will reach 14.2 Million dollars. The main drivers of growth will be specialized platforms that will be used to develop and test new products, as well as to implement projects with customers in need of rapid deployment of systems.
With the spread of public clouds, the need for specialized industry solutions is growing. The formation of a partner ecosystem around the functional markets of IaaS and, above all, PaaS is becoming a key success factor for the cloud business of service providers.
Businesses, for their part, are looking for the most effective ways to change the way they do business in the face of economic uncertainty. Platform cloud services PaaS become the basis for such changes, as they provide the ability to quickly adapt digital technologies to solve a wide range of tasks related to digital business transformation, IDC analysts say.
The increase in data associated with mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and traditional workloads is driving demand for all kinds of clouds.
However, according to a survey conducted by Forrester for Dell Technologies Pivotal and Microsoft Corporation, 100% of respondents use multiple cloud infrastructures and cloud applications. In addition, 99% of respondents believe that a single, unified approach to deploying, operating, and using combined infrastructure (IaaS) and platform services (PaaS) improves business IT services.
Survey participants also stated that they need integrated PaaS and IaaS services with unified identity and access controls, a single interface for development, runtime, and migration services.
As applications and traditional workloads move to different clouds, the advent of isolated clouds is hindering the full use of business-critical areas such as data analytics and artificial intelligence. Cloud platforms, infrastructure solutions, consumption models and services offered by vendors help organizations move to the cloud model.
PaaS by Dell EMC
The development of PaaS cloud platforms fits in with Dell EMC’s development strategy as a cloud service provider. At the same time experience gained by Dell in other areas is used.
For example, Dell EMC offerings include IaaS with VMware technologies for traditional applications; PaaS – architecture and containers with Pivotal software for cloud applications; the Virtustream platform, an enterprise-class public cloud; Azure services deployed on-premises using Microsoft Azure Stack. By integrating hardware, software, and tools, results can be significantly accelerated.
For example, Dell EMC VxRail’s purpose-built platform makes it easier, faster, and less risky to build, implement, and manage a software-defined data center (SDDC), including VMware NSX software and VMware vRealize Suite. VMware Validated Design for VxRail supports distributed high availability zone architecture and multi-site deployment with disaster recovery capability.
In addition, the new VMware Cloud Services component for cloud management, VMware Cloud Assembly, is integrated with VxRail for faster results. This dedicated HCI appliance provides integration with VMware Cloud Services solutions.
For a unified and consistent support for IT and cloud operations in the cloud, Cloud Data Mobility enables organizations to move data in and out of the cloud, increasing on-premises data storage capacity at the expense of the cloud. Dell EMC also improved storage utilization through integration with Virtustream Storage Cloud and Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage.
The Cloud Data Protection feature protects data stored on various cloud platforms. Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR is enhanced for cross-application, cloud-based disaster recovery on AWS as well as VMware Cloud on AWS. Cloud Control allows you to manage your cloud environments from anywhere. It is a free cloud application with CloudIQ machine learning features.
From the history of PaaS
Announced by Dell in 2011, VMware’s Cloud Foundry open source PaaS platform was the first major Open Source initiative in the PaaS segment. It allowed programmers to create applications based on various popular development systems. The Cloud Foundry cloud can be hosted on CloudFoundry.com, on a corporate server, in the cloud for example, Amazon Web Services.
In 2012, Dell introduced a new business platform. The Fast PaaS project based on Cloud Foundry has become a private cloud solution. The Fast PaaS solution is intended primarily for companies providing high value-added services such as billing or identity services.
In 2017, Boomi, which has been part of Dell since 2010, acquired ManyWho, which created the eponymous PaaS application development platform for automating business processes and communications between employees, customers, and enterprise core systems. The ManyWho development platform requires almost no programming, and provides data exchange.
These developments have been developed in Dell EMC converged / hyper-converged platforms.
Converged PaaS Platforms
PaaS platforms support delivery of both traditional and cloud applications. Development teams get a modern application infrastructure and runtime environment, automation tools to quickly launch new features and optimize system resources.
The Native Hybrid Cloud developer platform, including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is offered on the VxRail device. It combines the power of PaaS and Converged/Hyper Converged Infrastructure to build and deploy a wide range of applications.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry now provides integrated access to an ecosystem of leading open source cloud technologies. Platform as a service company also offers expert consulting and technology services, cloud infrastructure management services to help businesses to deliver better results.
