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Which term is more appropriate, Private PaaS or Enterprise PaaS?

  • What term should we be using to refer to the messier problem of providing on demand software to support the enterprise application deployment needs for existing apps? Platform on demand? Enterprise PaaS? Private PaaS? Stacks as a service? (Acronym collision with that last one.)Background on my question: (see also blog post for elaborated version at http://blog.rpath.com/bring-your-own-platform-as-a-service/)I spend a lot of time talking to customers and prospective customers about how to deliver on the benefits ascribed to cloud computing within their enterprise.So you’d expect terms like IaaS and PaaS to turn up a lot, wouldn’t you? And they do — but not the way many industry pundits might expect.Turns out, there’s a big topic lurking inside the PaaS discussion: Choice.Choices — OS, middleware, libraries, languages — and versions play a massive role in the software space. There are enormous degrees of freedom (liberties, one might say) and software is constantly changing, across its myriad of components. Worse, any given component is highly dependent on the versions of the other components, despite the very best efforts of software engineers to make it not so. One choice leads to another until pretty soon you’re mired in the choices that you have made.The enterprise needs to limit choice, but it can’t necessarily do it without severely limiting the utility of its cloud offering. IaaS is easily consumable by anyone who can bring his or her own software — and maintain all of it. But a narrowly restricted PaaS will only be useful for that narrow subset of apps that is already written to the specific architecture and choices that the ops team offers.So what is an enterprise private cloud to do? Offer only IaaS as a private cloud and stall in the pursuit of real business benefits? Offer PaaS of one form or another and tell folks to rewrite their apps to use the cloud?How do you have your cake and eat it to?This is a real challenge that the enterprise faces with platform-as-a-service. And given the very different nature of the problems involved in providing it, I find most of the operations architects I talk to reject the term PaaS as a descriptor, clarifying, “That’s not what we are trying to do here.”So what term should we be using to refer to this messier problem? Platform on demand? Enterprise PaaS? Private PaaS? Stacks as a service? (Acronym collision with that last one.)

  • Answer:

    IMHO, the distinction between public/private is fading away. So is the distinction between enterprise and non-enterprise. The design center is closing in on the same solution: scale-out, commodity, OSS, metered, secured, etc. That said, I think it's just "PaaS". Although, Amazon may have gotten in right in that there is no such thing as PaaS - just a bunch of as-a-Service offerings. No need to lump them together in a layer and give them a name. I hear people say stuff like "we use EC2, Mongo-aaS, Beanstalk and some SaaS billing provider". From the consumers perspective they're less interested in how a vendor packaged their offering and more interested in the individual services.

Jeff Schneider at Quora Visit the source

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If the solution you are reffering is indeed a platform, with narrow constraints that fits certain applications, I'd go with Enterprise PaaS. But if you are talking about converting existing applications into SaaS, without chaning code/platform, it's different kind of product. This is actually a deployment product which I would call SaaS Enabler, or something like that. It doesn't have to change the architecture and components of the existing app, or at least not drastically. But it must create that easy interface to consume the app. I hope it helped, but maybe if you give a use-case it would be easier to understand excatly what you want us to name :)

Hadar Weiss

A PaaS can surface many cloud dimensions, attributes, and capabilities.  Because the space is so broad, single adjective messaging (private, enterprise) does not usually provide enough delineation. Cloud dimensions include: sharing:  private/public/community location: on-premise/in-the-cloud responsibility: externally managed, internally managed A Private PaaS may be located on-premise, shared within the organization, and internally managed by the PaaS owner. A Private PaaS may also be deployed on-premise, internally managed, but offered to a public community.   All depends on whether you are the PaaS provider or the PaaS end-user.  The PaaS end-user sees a public PaaS, but the PaaS provider sees the service as their privately controlled domain. Enterprise, Small Medium Business (SMB), and consumer are market categories with distinct requirements.   Platforms and services may be either 'enterprise-ready' or not.   Enterprise-ready services interface with corporate identity management solutions, enforce enterprise policies,  integrate with enterprise monitoring and management solutions, and delivered with strict service level agreements (SLA). My blog explains more about cloud dimensions, cloud characteristics, PaaS differentiation.

Chris Haddad

I think the line is very clear: the "infrastructure stack" - OS & below is IaaS; the "application stack" is PaaS and the "software stack" is SaaS. If one expects only data & associated interfaces/APIs from the customers the offering is SaaS; if one expects the customers to deploy code that also incorporates APIs/interfaces that is more than data integration, then it is PaaS; and the rest is IaaS Private vs. Public is a spatial question - mainly which side of the firewall are the services hosted Cloud by definition is on-demand, elastic and consumed on a pay-per-use IMHO, all the things you are referring to could be explained with the current ontology Cheers & HTH

Krishna Sankar

The term "PaaS" definitely seems to mean different things to different people. Gartner breaks the category down into multiple sub-categories. My company (ActiveState) has a product like you describe (called Stackato). We call Stackato a "Private PaaS". Gartner calls it a "CEAP" (Cloud Enabled Application Platform). CEAP may be more descriptive, but I've never heard anyone outside Gartner use it. I've also never heard anyone use the term "Enterprise PaaS" and I'm not sure it's very useful.

Brent Smithurst

I have to agree with most of Krishna's comments except that a) The middleware stack corresponds to PaaS and application stack would be a SaaS. Also an in enterprise a PaaS ( or a Service delivery platform) could perform certain tasks of mediating (as broker) between an enterprise user and a service provider. To elaborate, the platform in an enterprise could be authenticating and authorizing a user to the services he/she needs to use. For example, some users in the company would need an exchange email service ( read more expensive) and some could do with gmail and the "Platform" manages the lifecycle of the email service including sign up, daily use and unsubscribe.  This paper on PaaS from a Service provider's perspective should be interesting for enterprise IT - Platform as a Service: The Next Big Opportunity for Communications Service Providers by Lynda Stadtmueller, Program Director – Cloud Services at Stratecast.

Ranjit K. Nayak

Rodrigo Flores of Cisco recently posted this http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/features/guestopinions/blog/the-road-to-paas-understanding-your-post-iaas-options/?cs=50822 which speaks to the same difference in viewpoint that I'm seeing (and which prompted my original question). Rodrigo draws a distinction between the current industry PaaS offerings and what the enterprise needs today as a distinction between what he calls “Silicon Valley PaaS” and “Enterprise PaaS.”. Those terms help characterize the issue I'm seeing by eliminating the generic use of PaaS that vendors typically use right now and replacing it with qualified variants.

Brett Adam

That's an interesting question. I will follow Hadar's answer and will say that the word PaaS must be in use here although I am not sure that this pinpointing what you want to say .. that is IMO an enabler of legacy on the cloud. I will choose Enterprise PaaS and for sure will talk about enablement of resource sharing/multi-tenant. HTH

Ofir Nachmani

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