PaaS - is it right for me ?

An organisation embarking on a cloud journey invariably ends up looking for PaaS solutions. PaaS sounds like something that will help me take away all my pains. Creating your application, using drag and drop controls in a browser and everything else taken care (from deployment to running to scalability to back up of data and what not) sounds something exciting and very hard to believe.

Anyway, who wants to deal with the IT folks and deal with all the tantrums they throw, what is possible and what is not.

Bernard Golden, in his article "What You Need to Know About PaaS" talks about the various issues that need to be looked at, when selecting your PaaS vendor.

• Lock-in - The productivity gains you get by using vendor API's also mean you get locked on to the platform and application migration becomes all the more difficult.
• Complexity - Writing PaaS application is not the same as writing regular applications. Depending on the vendor, the complexity of writing application increases as you try to add more functionality
• Cloud Service Provider Differentiation - The whole premise of PaaS platform is to make the writing of applications easy. With all the abstraction the platform provide, you end up getting locked at operation level
• New Skills - PaaS platforms require new set of skills which means either re-train your existing employee or hire new people
• Mapping existing practices to new frameworks - Every enterprise will have standard processes, tools and methodologies of working and developing applications. All these need to be re-looked based on the PaaS platform

All in all, PaaS platforms need to be evaluated based on your requirements and fitment as per your organisation needs.

Read the complete article here.