FOCUS CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE
Issue 20, Feb/March
. . . from page 40
INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE Many cloud
operators use separate
management tools to monitor their server and power environments but integrated solutions
are now available that allow administrators to manage physical servers, virtual servers, UPSs, PDUs and more all through a single console. n
Eaton: The Cloud needs automation
JOURNEY TO PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE Accenture’s technology vision off ers guidance on how to approach PaaS
test a possible new protocol for flagging and prioritizing calls regarding the latest product release, working with a subset of customer service representatives. If customer satisfaction scores go up, the protocol can be integrated into the standard procedure. If not, the experiment can be iterated or scrapped rapidly.
P A STRING OF PEARLS
For years, many IT organizations have been striving for these levels
of agility.
They’ve tried to structure applications as collections of services. They’ve also invested substantially in integration efforts – think middleware – and funded custom development to extend the services. These efforts have also tended to remain in-house – a burden for all concerned. Chief Information Offi cers are now looking outside their four walls to fi nd easier paths to IT agility.
PaaS offerings – defi ned as platforms sourced from, and hosted by,
a service provider
that handles the platform’s maintenance, evolution and operation – have been touted as an option but until recently have not been suffi ciently developed to be practical. Platform providers were not prepared to commit to the service level agreements (SLAs) that CIOs would typically require before moving critical business applications to the platform. Similarly, CIOs may not have had any clarity on how PaaS would impact their organization’s technology direction.
But the PaaS landscape is changing fast. More IT departments are now engaging and experimenting with PaaS, although primarily for ancillary services. For example, security
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latform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies are emerging as key enablers to turn aspiration into reality. A call center can quickly
company G4S is about to deploy a cash- intransit application on Azure. And Lionsgate, a global entertainment company, is deploying its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to Amazon Web Services.
COST-SAVING EXERCISE
It is tempting for CIOs and their top managers to evaluate PaaS as a cost-saving measure, using technical specifi cations as their lens. If they continue to do this, they will miss a large part of PaaS’s potential. Instead, the key is to stay focused on the business services that will require a signifi cant level of innovation, fl exibility, iteration and, therefore, experimentation over the lifetime of an application.
It is PaaS’s ability to enable the business to act quickly that will ultimately differentiate the organization from its competitors.
ADDITIONAL CAPABILITIES
Platform providers have made signifi cant strides, adding capabilities that were not typical this time last year. Data options on various platforms have increased: Google now offers Google Cloud SQL for use with Google App Engine, and Microsoft is piloting a Hadoop distribution on Azure.
Enterprises that want to leverage developers’ skills now have Java-based PaaS, such as Red Hat’s OpenShift. And operational support – one of the biggest concerns for any IT shop – is now available. For instance, Rackspace now provides support for OpenStack.
There is also an accelerating convergence toward the PaaS space as the other ‘as-a- service’ players move up and down the stack, each pushing toward a more complete set of capabilities on every layer. Today, providers
with rich catalogues of business services – the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) players, for example – are pushing down the stack, offering platform capabilities to augment their offerings. Salesforce, NetSuite and Workday are actively moving into the PaaS space. SAP and Oracle are also expanding the relevance of their SaaS offerings with PaaS. Here we’ll see an upsurge in PaaS ‘app stores’ that unify the services offered on the platform – lightweight software engineering practices for assembling solutions will be the norm.
ENTER THE APP STORES
PaaS app stores such as Salesforce’s AppExchange,
Intuit Marketplace and
Apperian are just the beginning. At the same time, providers with strong infrastructure capabilities
– such as the traditional
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) players – are busily adding platform services in order to climb the stack. In the short term, the emphasis here will be on custom development. For instance, VMware has moved from virtualization infrastructure,
products into virtualization and is now establishing
itself as a cloud platform provider with the introduction of Cloud Foundry. Others, such as Red Hat, through its OpenShift PaaS offering, are adopting similar strategies.
PaaS involves shorter development cycles, enabling organizations to iterate functionality and respond more nimbly to short-term opportunities. For example, during holiday shopping sales surges, the platform allows the business to quickly add new functionality without an 18-month development lifecycle.
At the most basic level, PaaS must offer a breadth of applications and services that attract
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