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Recently, Eric Knipp of Gartner, a highly respected analyst in the cloud application development space, wrote a blog post about how enterprises are warming up to the idea of private PaaS and much less to public PaaS. This strongly validates our belief that enterprises can benefit from using PaaS for improving developer productivity, lowering operational costs and accelerating time-to-market of business critical applications.

But not all private PaaS options are suitable for enterprises and we see vendor lock-in as one of the major risks associated with PaaS. Because of the “blackbox” nature of traditional PaaS offerings, once applications are written to a particular PaaS platform, they lose the portability presenting a major risk - greater than any infrastructure component individually. Even though some of the PaaS solutions (Cloud Foundry, Apprenda, Stackato, etc.) promise greater developer productivity and operations benefits, enterprise applications are much more complex and diverse in nature and a traditional private PaaS is not a good option to deploy business critical and distributed applications.

Let’s consider an example of a typical dot com site for a medium-to-large enterprise. E-commerce websites inherently have complex distributed architectures, involving several application tiers and several modules written in many different languages. The datastore, DR and high availability requirements are extremely complex for any PaaS to be able to deploy such applications. Most of the enterprise applications are complex in nature and hence one-size-fits-all PaaS isn’t the right solution for enterprises. What enterprises need along with PaaS is a suite of cloud services (similar to Amazon’s RDS, DynamoDB, Elastic Load Balancer, Simple Queue Service, etc.) which allows developers to orchestrate and instantiate services for a given workload with great flexibility, and deploy any distributed complex architecture on any cloud, private or public. AWS has chosen not to build a PaaS because PaaS can only satisfy the cloud requirements of a limited set of applications, whereas modular cloud services gives customers the flexibility to choose the specific services they need. Each cloud service is fully-managed, monitored, autoscales and eliminates the need for developers or Ops to manage any piece of infrastructure. PaaS on the other hand, limits developer capabilities to code applications to a specific PaaS platform and defeats the purpose of building a cloud application.

In the past couple of years, we have worked with several enterprises and enterprise workloads and decided to develop scalable modular cloud services - based on AWS cloud services model, so we can provide the same feature-rich cloud services to enterprises for their on-premise deployments. Using a single console pane, developers and Ops now have the choice of using PaaS for some workloads and use modular cloud services for highly distributed applications. Moreover, CumuLogic Cloud Services provide the flexibility to provision workloads on any cloud - private or public and hence a better choice than a private PaaS.