The number one benefit of cloud computing is agility. The value of bringing new features or products to market far outweigh the other benefits such as cost reduction. PaaS takes agility to another level by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure and application stack so that developers can focus more on business requirements and less on technical requirements. If agility is king and PaaS is the king of agility, then why are enterprises so slow to embrace it?
Barriers to PaaS adoption
In January of this year I highlighted three challenges that PaaS providers had to overcome to gain more traction in the enterprise. Eight months have passed and these challenges still need to be addressed. To make matters worse, I have encountered more barriers preventing enterprises from adopting PaaS.
1) Confusing marketing message
Ask five people what PaaS is and you’ll get five different answers. There are PaaS solutions that focus narrowly on specific areas like mobile, DevOps, big data, etc. as well as general purpose PaaS solutions that target application development. Even IaaS providers like AWS are blurring the lines between IaaS and PaaS by releasing robust APIs that provide specific abstracted feature sets as opposed to an entire development platform (e.g. Redshift, Cloud Formation, Kinesis, etc.).
There are also many permutations of Paas including public, private, and hybrid. To further complicate its use, PaaS can be delivered as a managed service, be managed on-prem, or be hosted on either private or public clouds. There are so many options, each with their own pros and cons, that I had to build a matrix to keep track of them all.
To make matters worse, each PaaS provider takes a different approach to PaaS which means there is no one standard that can be used to compare these solutions.
2) Lack of maturity (PaaS)
Of the three different cloud service models (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), PaaS is by far the least mature. SaaS, on the other hand, has been trusted by enterprises to offload numerous non-core business functions including CRM, payroll, human resources, expense reporting and others for years. IaaS is still in its early phase of maturity but has enjoyed significant adoption within the enterprise in recent years. PaaS, however, has very little traction within large organizations and even when it does make it into an enterprise it is usually only used by a single team or a small percentage of the overall development group.
Each vendor will point to their customer success stories, but I could combine all of the PaaS vendors’ significant implementations and fit it on a one pager. This means that PaaS in general is not battle tested in the real world, which is the root cause of the next barrier on the list.
3) Lack of operational features
It is important to understand the history of PaaS to understand why it’s a laggard when it comes to operations. The original intent of PaaS was to abstract away all of the messy and challenging IT plumbing work so developers could just write code. PaaS’s original promise was “forget about infrastructure and operations, we will handle that for you.” The first PaaS solutions like Google App Engine, Force.com, Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. were all targeting public clouds. Startups and SMBs loved PaaS because they could quickly build and deploy software with fewer people, less complexity, and without managing a datacenter. Enterprises did not embrace this model because there are no guaranteed SLAs. Most enterprises are also not ready to put all workloads in the public cloud so they looked for private or hybrid solutions.
Thus, private and hybrid PaaS solutions were born. The problem with most of these solutions is that they cater to the developers and neglect much of the needs of the operations teams. With private PaaS, enterprises now have another layer of architecture to manage. In addition to managing infrastructure, they now need to manage a PaaS. That means that these new PaaS solutions must also cater to system administrators, security architects, operations managers, etc. This starts to look and feel a lot like IaaS under the covers. Most enterprise are moving to a multi cloud environment so these PaaS solutions must work seamlessly on top of multiple infrastructure solutions. Private PaaS must be much more than a just a developer platform to survive in the enterprise. It must provide a rich feature set for policy management, deep integration with existing IDM solutions, provide high availability, allow for SLA management, disaster recovery, and much more.
4) Lack of maturity of IaaS
Public IaaS solutions are far more mature than private cloud solutions. In the private cloud space, OpenStack has a great brand name but still takes a significant effort to implement. CenturyLink, HP, IBM, and others are progressing in this space but all private cloud solutions are far from mature at this time. If you were a CIO, how good would you feel taking a very immature PaaS solution and deploying it on immature private cloud infrastructure? Most CIOs would rather focus on getting IaaS right first before embarking on a PaaS journey.
5) The Java and .Net dilemma
Most PaaS providers tout how they support many development languages including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, Node, .Net, etc. In most enterprises, Java and .Net are the only two significant languages that must be supported. The problem is nobody is good at supporting both. Apprenda and Microsoft are about the only two who provide superior .Net support. They both support other languages too but let’s face it, their strength is in .Net. On the other side of the coin, the rest of the PaaS providers offer great support for most open source languages but offer limited or no support for .Net.
6) Where is the speed to market?
As you read through all of the challenges mentioned above you’ve probably realized that it takes a lot of effort to successfully implement a private PaaS along with all the operational processes required to deliver SLAs, high availability, make auditors and security teams happy, and actually service the application developers. Once you get there (if you get there) then you can take advantage of the agility PaaS provides. But how long will this take for your organization and do your executives have the patience to wait for it? I am not saying this is unachievable. What I am saying is many enterprises have this belief that you can simply buy a PaaS solution and developers will immediately start achieving greater speed to market. This is far from reality as a lot of planning and hard work is required to implement PaaS successfully. Once they realize what is involved to really pull this off at scale across the enterprise, they often have second thoughts. Sure this can be done quicker when it is focused on a small team but I am talking about broad adoption within the enterprise.
7) No clear industry leader
Big companies like to hang their hat on big companies. The big names like Pivotal and Open Shift are making progress but neither of them is clearly winning this space (although they will tell you they are). The most impressive large-scale implementations are coming from Apprenda and WSO2 at this time. Many clients question the longevity of the smaller players and worry about the cash that the bigger players are burning without the revenue backing it up. Many CIOs look at this space and are nervous about the long term viability of these companies. I don’t know whether that concern is justified but perception is often reality.
8) Value proposition not fully understood
The final challenge is that many IT people still don’t get the value of PaaS. I can’t count how many companies are willingly or unwillingly building a “Poor man’s PaaS” on top of their IaaS layer. I frequently recommend to clients that they look strongly at PaaS before building a suite of services that exist out of the box in most of today’s PaaS solutions. However, these barriers I have listed often prevent enterprises from embracing PaaS.
There is still the control issue as well. Many IT shops just can’t give up control. Whether it is lack of trust, job security fears, limited research and understanding, or simply a cultural issue, many IT shops still value control over agility.
Summary
I predicted earlier this year that PaaS will take off in 2015. I still feel that this prediction has a chance of being accurate. I have been watching all of the PaaS players closely and they are aggressively addressing these barriers. While PaaS providers may disagree with much of this article, my advice to them is to view this post as constructive criticism. Consider these recommendations from an enterprise perspective as this list was derived from working on cloud projects for numerous F500 companies.
None of these barriers are insurmountable. The biggest fear I have for these vendors is that the longer it takes them to penetrate the enterprise market, the higher the risk of enterprises turning to public PaaS solutions. Every year, more workloads will move to public clouds. Once a majority of mission critical applications are deployed in a public cloud, enterprises will likely bypass the private/hybrid PaaS tools altogether in favor of what PaaS was originally meant to be, an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure.
