IaaS

Achieving Application Portability with PaaS

Bobby Varghese

Today, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is increasingly gaining popularity as a Public Cloud offering compared to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) because of its simple operations and lower costs. These days, most PaaS customers get locked-in because of the specialized OS or middleware features but for the customers looking for flexibility in working across multiple Cloud platforms and providers, a portable PaaS environment is a feasible choice.

Before we see how organizations can implement a portable PaaS model, let’s first see the primary reasons behind the adoption of PaaS services:

  • Lesser costs of licensing and supporting because of the pre-installed OS and middleware.
  • Streamlined Hybrid Cloud deployment with standardized application services.
  • Improved application performance and functionality by creating a PaaS environment within the IaaS Cloud using the available web services.

How a portable PaaS model fairs across these three areas and how it moves within the various cloud and private environments is important but a single PaaS approach might not be enough to address this. Thus, enterprises need to prioritize their PaaS goals and combine different options to create the desired PaaS environment.

 

Here are the top 4 ways to achieve a Portable PaaS model:

Adopt Container Technology for Application Hosting: The container architectures share the Operating System, but the middleware and file system elements can be copied to each container to standardize the middleware across container images. This allows the creation of specialized container images for the application and the component which can then be moved across environments to be run on any container system hosted in Cloud or the Data Center. Read more →

Leveraging Cloud Computing for maximum business value

Bobby Varghese

With the advancement in technology, there has been a shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Barely a decade old, cloud computing has been a game changer in the tech world and if utilized correctly, it can prove to be advantageous to an enterprise. However, to ensure efficiency, care should be taken and detailed research is imperative while selecting the Cloud that best fits an organizations workload. Lower cost due to the elimination of capital expense, high speed of processes, scalability when necessary and reliability with respect to data backup and recovery are a few of the many benefits, that make Cloud Computing a must have.

In this article, we have listed the top 6 ways in which businesses can make use of Cloud Technology:

Virtualisation (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Being cost-effective and scalable, it is one of the most attractive solutions for any enterprise. IaaS helps in reducing the investment on Physical hardware thereby reducing the IT and capital costs.

Application Development and Testing (Platform-as-a-Service): Constantly acquiring and installing new hardware and software becomes an expensive affair for any enterprise.­­ Thus, using a Cloud environment to develop applications proves to be a more practical choice. Developers can simply log-in to their Cloud platform and can access the tools required to create applications.
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Key Cloud trends to watch in 2017

Bobby Varghese

The cloud market continues to grow at an explosive rate, with an increasing number of enterprises adopting the trend to realize cost and scale efficiencies.

Here are some key Cloud trends to watch in 2017:

Big public cloud providers will enjoy a sharp increase in their revenues: The global public cloud market is growing at a CAGR of 22%. According to Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti, the majority share of this growth will come from the big cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. According to the Synergy group, Amazon’s share of the market for IaaS and PaaS was 30% with 53% growth in the revenue year-on-year. Microsoft’s share was over 10% with 100% revenue growth.

PaaS will continue to drive the cloud market: VC firm North Bridge predicts that Platform-as-a-Service will see the greatest growth (33 percent CAGR) followed by Software-as-a -Service (19 percent) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (18 percent).

The public cloud services market will gain momentum: Given the time and costs involved in building private clouds, CIOs may find themselves switching to the public cloud. CIOs feel that they were spending a lot of time, energy, effort, and management bandwidth to create an infrastructure that already exists out there in a much better state and is evolving at a furious pace.

Big public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft are opening new data centers and making concessions but they won’t be able to service every request. Thus, smaller players will enjoy the business in 2017.

Multi-cloud options may persist: In the coming years, the use of multi-cloud strategies will become common to avoid public cloud lock-in. Enterprises will continue to look for various cloud providers and will move towards selecting a model where they can combine services from multiple partners to reach the optimal level of efficiency.

“Belief that one cloud vendor can meet all needs is simply out of touch with reality and smacks of vendor hubris,” said Julia White, Corporate VP for Azure.

Enterprise applications to run on the public cloud: CIOs have become more comfortable in hosting critical software and business apps such as SAP on the public cloud. Bartoletti believes that as CIOs rely more heavily on public cloud providers, this trend will continue. “Enterprise are turning great ideas into software and insights faster and the cloud is the best place to get quick insights out of enterprise data,” Bartoletti says.

Private data centers will continue to exist: Though many enterprises are shifting to a public cloud model, a great majority of organizations will continue to favor both, data-center-based computing and the public cloud for legal and privacy reasons.

According to North Bridge’s survey done for 1,351 cloud companies, majority companies (47%) are straddling between the public and private cloud, 30% are strongly favoring the public cloud, and 23% are favoring the private cloud.