22 ms·

Is PaaS dead?

133 points by esher 11y ago

gamesbrainiac 11y ago
I think PaaS demand is going to die down in the near future. The simple reason is that before, it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. Nonetheless, I doubt PaaSes will disappear, they will still remain useful for hobby projects as you can see with this quote: The free usage got less attractive, paid hobbyist usage got more attractive. I find it notable that the hobby-pricing-level is competitive with DigitalOcean.
- esher 11y ago
  thx, your comment sums up the article quite good > Problem already solved, PaaS probably not needed. Is in return DigitalOcean only for hobby projects?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > I think PaaS demand is going to die down in the near future. The simple reason is that before, it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. No matter what the tools are, I think people realized that the simplicity PaaS tried to offer doesn't exist (regarding availability, scaling etc). Even Heroku isn't able to accomplish it, and they're what I would've considered the leader in the space.
- pbreit 11y ago
  And by the time you really "need to scale", you'll typically have plenty of resources to figure it out. It seems to me the pull is inexorable to bare metal or a close equivalent.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- detaro 11y ago
  > it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. Curious, what kind of tools are you thinking of? Because the ones I'd be thinking of as coming out right now kinda fall into the category of PaaS, just that you can self-host them if you want.
spo81rty 11y ago
PaaS is not dead and it is not going anywhere. We use Azure's PaaS features known as Cloud Services and App Services (a.k.a. Azure websites/web apps). They make deploying and scaling your app as easy as it could ever be. The App Service plans also allow you to combine multiple apps together on a group of servers which enables you to save a lot of money if you have a lot of small applications. Now of course I could use a bunch of automation and do this all myself with VMs... but why? Just use Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, etc.
- x5n1 11y ago
  > why? because have more time than money.
  - spo81rty 11y ago
    Azure App Services and AWS Elastic Bean Stalk aren't any more expensive than the same size VMs.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Yes, but AWS VMs are expensive overall.
  - douche 11y ago
    Cheap as the prices are on AWS and Azure for most things, I'd have to be valuing my time far, far, below minimum wage for that equation to make sense.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
wstrange 11y ago
Part of the challenge is that PasS platforms have quite a bit of vendor lock in. I can foresee the growth of do-it-yourself PaaS, built on Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  > Part of the challenge is that PasS platforms have quite a bit of vendor lock in. Cloud Foundry is an installable opensource PaaS. You can use a hosted version or set up your own on AWS, Azure, OpenStack and I forget what else. > I can foresee the growth of do-it-yourself PaaS, built on Docker, Kubernetes, etc. RedHat are packaging these for OpenShift Origin. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which is the major donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry.
roeme 11y ago
I think it's safe to invoke Betteridge's Law here. Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary). The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein. Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.
- dilemma 11y ago
  It's even older than mainframe vs microcomputers. It'd centralization vs distribution, and its the fundamental question to human life, which is necessarily social and therefore needs organization. Interestingly, the answer is always "both", just in different ways. AWS could be used as an example argue that technology and society is becoming more centralized, and that it is becoming more distributed. It's all about what your focus is.
rbanffy 11y ago
It depends. It's getting easier to assemble scalable we application out of IaaS offerings. OTOH, writing against, say, Google App Engine is not as simple as writing for Django or Flask. It's, however, educational.
- jasoncartwright 11y ago
  Agree, but there are tools to help. We maintain Djangae, to run Django on App Engine. https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae
Aqueous 11y ago
We run applications for dozens of clients across several different language stacks on Heroku. Our entire (rapidly expanding) business depends on it. If we had to maintain those instances ourselves, it would require a full time dev ops employee, if not multiple. We've side-stepped the requirement for any dedicated devops staff by relying on Heroku's automation for this. So I really do not see how PaaS is even remotely close to dead. Those companies probably don't release glitzy PR bragging about their success (like most VC-funded companies trying to generate hype) because they don't need to - the money just keeps rolling in. If I start seeing PaaS companies vanishing inexplicably then I'll start to wonder.
- dougbarrett 11y ago
  I 100% agree. I was launching apps on linode and running into open file limit issues because of the amount of traffic the application was receiving. One server could handle the load find if it wasn't for that (as far as I knew at the time) but I tried launching it on Heroku and saw immediately there were no issues handling the traffic we were sending to it. It may not be the fastest or cheapest, but it was turning into the majority of my time spent on figuring out how to configure a server that could handle the traffic rather than me focusing on actual development. The added monthly cost is a fraction of the cost it would take me to actively manage the servers. People thought that the price changes a few months ago would be the death of Heroku but in reality we are saving money compared to what we were playing previously.
  - ownagefool 11y ago
    You should be able to change the file handle limit without much effort? I'm not saying you made the wrong choice, if you don't have some pretty deep sysadmin skills, you should probably be outsourcing your hosting, but that seems like a weird justification. All that really matters is Heroku is cheaper than people. When it no longer is, you start thinking about hiring.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  You'd need a full time devops staff, but you can run your stuff on heroku? I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard it is to run a server. Most of the time it's painful, you take a day or two to write a build script, then everyone forgets about it because it's fully automated.
andysinclair 11y ago
I disagree, I think PaaS is in its infancy and will grow not die. One PaaS not mentioned in the article, Microsoft Azure, is growing fast and provides a vast range of services. We run an enterprise grade SaaS product on PaaS, and I personally have several apps running on PaaS. These solutions would have taken much longer to get to market without PaaS and be much more complex to manage and maintain.
- tyre 11y ago
  Seconded. Post also does not mention AWS. Starting a government-focused startup, their FedRAMP certification is invaluable. No way we could go through that process (multiple years, tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars) and make an affordable product. Author did make a good point about devs being problem solvers who want to do it themselves. A great sign of a truly senior engineer is focus on the outcomes and offloading the non-business-critical things. (This isn't to say DevOps isn't important, but unless your business relies on innovative ops as a core piece of what it offers, don't spend time on that.)
joshmn 11y ago
I cannot imagine how many startups would have failed to successfully launch (as they had) if it wasn't for the ease-of-use of hosting their platform, such as Heroku. I know that early on I wouldn't have had the patience/confidence to roll my own stack on a node, let alone trust its integrity.
- leftwich 11y ago
  I'm not a developer and use Heroku to host my site. It would be a major inconvenience for me if PaaS went away. I imagine there are enough others like me that will keep these companies around awhile.
mkozlows 11y ago
A look at the PaaS landscape that doesn't mention AWS (Elastic Beanstalk) or Azure is a very weird look. Why is it getting harder for randos to succeed in PaaS? Because they're competing with Amazon and Microsoft, and that's hard.
- Aqueous 11y ago
  I think beyond it simply being difficult to compete with AWS and Microsoft, the more specific reason is that those providers (plus the smaller ones that are probably also thriving) all support pretty much any language / configuration you can throw it them, so the barrier of entry is too high. For a new PaaS start-up to compete you'd need automate the provisioning and deployment of dozens of different languages out of the gate, or support at least one of these stacks much, much better than any of the existing PaaS too, such that it makes it the obvious choice for that language. WPEngine would be an example of a PaaS that specializes in a single stack better than any of the multi-stack players. Heroku too started off as a PaaS specialist for Ruby on Rails, and now has expanded to supporting many languages and configurations. If you specialize you have a shot at besting AWS or Azure - if your goal is to support all of the existing stacks plus new ones, then forget it.
  - lnanek2 11y ago
    Not to mention you have to beat their prices too. AWS and Microsoft are expected to keep prices low to keep out competition.
    - analognoise 11y ago
      Or are they leveraging their resources to provide a capable service at a lower cost? Two huge players (and other competition) seems like a healthy space, unless they're colluding.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Colluding to keep prices low? Usually it's the other way around.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I am a paying Heroku customer and I used to use AppEngine a fair mount. I would argue that both of these PaaS are doing well. I don't think the article even mentioned AppEngine.
surprised 11y ago
In terms of market cap, how do Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, and Azure compare with Heroku? Can we really make a claim on the PaaS landscape without talking about some of the biggest players? I'd be very curious to know how the 4 mentioned services are doing.
nl 11y ago
I think the Docker based self-hosted PAASs (Deis, Flynn etc) is squeezing the smaller PAAS offering at the low end, and Elastic Beanstalk/Azure/Google CloudDB is killing it at the high end. Why would you use <insert random small PAAS company> when you can deploy your own on AWS and then use their managed DB service?
jolux 11y ago
Paas dead? And heading right into the easter season, too. :(
jacques_chester 11y ago
This got passed around at work. The problems are: 1. PaaS is such a good idea that everyone is building their own. Even though the field has matured -- Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are already available and supported by major vendors. 2. The author cherrypicked a selection of failed small vendors as the marker of the trend. By this logic every single technological advance of the past 100 years is dead. Meanwhile, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has the fastest-growing sales of any opensource product in history. What I agree with: PaaSes don't get love from techies because we like to tinker. We always assume we can do better. We often can, and for special cases PaaSes may not be suitable. But large organisations with heterogenous teams and apps, PaaSes are godsend. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry.
ebrewste 11y ago
I'm a user of Heroku, and I went in with the idea that the add ins (DBs, notification, logging, etc.) offerings would be super easy to use and compelling to stay in the eco system. They are super easy to use, but I learned that so are their competitors, and they don't integrate into Heroku in a compelling way. I ended up with a DBaaS that was miles more expensive than the AWS competitor that I will switch to when I get a chance. The base Heroku service, while not super cheap is one of the few pieces of my puzzle that may not change. AWS EB is probably better than the Heroku dynos, but not so much that it's on my short list of things to do.
programminggeek 11y ago
Good news PaaS is dead, so it will start making buckets of money!
arihant 11y ago
No mention of App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry, Parse, Firebase. The only company I recognize from that list is Heroku. If you do not even talk about market leaders in a space, you're almost guaranteed to form an inaccurate opinion. That said, if the point he is trying to make that newcomers aren't there or aren't innovating, that's wrong too. PaaS is not moving at the slow rate that traditional hosting went through. So the term Gartner defines goes out of date before they publish their reports. There has been plenty innovation by Parse, Firebase, Compose, Mongo in 2015. IBM Bluemix came to the scene with great modularity and Watson as a service. Google brought in a bunch of new stuff too. Docker didn't kill PaaS, that's like saying LAN wires killed servers. It just pushed the level of abstraction in PaaS a bit higher. Being able to throw code and being able to run it without thinking of hardware is a very 2014 problem for most people. The sex is in what's coming next. PaaS has evolved.
- discodave 11y ago
  Also, is AWS Lambda PaaS? Or something else?
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Lambda is something new. It's akin to BaaS (backend-as-a-service, like Parse or Firebase), but operates fairly differently from them, and doesn't have the mobile focus. Not sure if I'd lump it under BaaS or if it's an entirely new category (EaaS, execution-as-a-service?).
    - krakensden 11y ago
      How is it something new? It seems a lot like App Engine to me, albeit with less tooling.
      - nostrademons 11y ago
        The interface to the outside world is different, the granularity of abstraction is different, and the pricing model is different. All those make it suitable for different applications, which indicates it's a new market and not going after the same customers as a PaaS. AppEngine still treats your whole codebase as an "app" - all your handlers share configuration, they share a data store, and you interact with them over straight HTTP or XMPP. You're billed per instance-hour, which implies instances (virtual machines), and the control panel is setup to scale the number of instances devoted to your app. Lambda is just a collection of functions, and you setup those functions to be triggered on various events. Those events could include HTTP requests to an API gateway, but they also include S3 or DynamoDB writes, Cloudwatch monitoring, SNS, and a wide variety of other apps. You're billed only for computing time; having an Amazon Lambda function uploaded that's doing nothing costs you nothing. I get the sense that Amazon Lambda : database triggers :: Google AppEngine : webapps. The former is utility code that glues together events in multiple storage systems; the latter is designed to serve a single application and interface with all of its data needs.
SFjulie1 11y ago
Was PaaS ever alive? Technically that stuff works yes. As much as driver service on demand exists for people who don't want to own a car or learn how to drive it and do not want to walk, use a bike and don't care about parking space. As long as investors are over investing. It is living on perfusion. I mean PaaS as a business? PaaS/IaaS is overly ridiculously expensive for competent team. It is usable for companies who do not care about the OPEX... the costs of resources ... the costs of not hiring competent dev/sysadmins. We are in recession, the source of investments is gonna run dry, so I guess it is time to see PaaS users' slowly bankrupt while the cheap competitors will survive. Business is a harsh world for those who do not care about costs and prices.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  We are in what?
iamleppert 11y ago
Wow I never knew the Nodejitsu guys became part of Godaddy: "Nodejitsu has joined GoDaddy We are excited to join GoDaddy to help spearhead their largest Node.js product: Website Builder." That has got to be the saddest acquisition I've ever heard.
esher 11y ago
Article author here. Thanks for all the feedback. Many of you missed the big players like Azure, AWS (Lambda & Elastic Beanstalk), Google App Engine … Well, that's true. Due to my perspective I am mostly interested in the "bootstrapability" of the business model here: What are our companions are doing?
- Maarten88 11y ago
  > I am mostly interested in the "bootstrapability" of the business model here By that definition I can see how you think it's dead. I'm afraid the opportunity for that went away several years ago, by now all the early innovators were bought by big vendors. It seems like an awfully capital-intensive and global business to me.
gnuchu 11y ago
Interesting attempt to spell Czech.
golergka 11y ago
> PaaS is a black-box; it's proprietary; it's a beautiful island; it's not as versatile as a home-grown solution. Developers love the freedom of root access, they want to able install any open-source software they like. While PaaS is offering well defined and thoughtful solutions. Wow, there's a lot of fancy talk to avoid the phrase "vendor lock-in" here.

133 points by esher 11y ago

I think PaaS demand is going to die down in the near future. The simple reason is that before, it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. Nonetheless, I doubt PaaSes will disappear, they will still remain useful for hobby projects as you can see with this quote: The free usage got less attractive, paid hobbyist usage got more attractive. I find it notable that the hobby-pricing-level is competitive with DigitalOcean.

esher 11y ago
thx, your comment sums up the article quite good > Problem already solved, PaaS probably not needed. Is in return DigitalOcean only for hobby projects?
toomuchtodo 11y ago
> I think PaaS demand is going to die down in the near future. The simple reason is that before, it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. No matter what the tools are, I think people realized that the simplicity PaaS tried to offer doesn't exist (regarding availability, scaling etc). Even Heroku isn't able to accomplish it, and they're what I would've considered the leader in the space.
pbreit 11y ago
And by the time you really "need to scale", you'll typically have plenty of resources to figure it out. It seems to me the pull is inexorable to bare metal or a close equivalent.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
detaro 11y ago
> it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore. Curious, what kind of tools are you thinking of? Because the ones I'd be thinking of as coming out right now kinda fall into the category of PaaS, just that you can self-host them if you want.

spo81rty 11y ago

PaaS is not dead and it is not going anywhere. We use Azure's PaaS features known as Cloud Services and App Services (a.k.a. Azure websites/web apps). They make deploying and scaling your app as easy as it could ever be. The App Service plans also allow you to combine multiple apps together on a group of servers which enables you to save a lot of money if you have a lot of small applications. Now of course I could use a bunch of automation and do this all myself with VMs... but why? Just use Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, etc.

x5n1 11y ago
> why? because have more time than money.
- spo81rty 11y ago
  Azure App Services and AWS Elastic Bean Stalk aren't any more expensive than the same size VMs.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Yes, but AWS VMs are expensive overall.
- douche 11y ago
  Cheap as the prices are on AWS and Azure for most things, I'd have to be valuing my time far, far, below minimum wage for that equation to make sense.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

wstrange 11y ago

Part of the challenge is that PasS platforms have quite a bit of vendor lock in. I can foresee the growth of do-it-yourself PaaS, built on Docker, Kubernetes, etc.

jacques_chester 11y ago
> Part of the challenge is that PasS platforms have quite a bit of vendor lock in. Cloud Foundry is an installable opensource PaaS. You can use a hosted version or set up your own on AWS, Azure, OpenStack and I forget what else. > I can foresee the growth of do-it-yourself PaaS, built on Docker, Kubernetes, etc. RedHat are packaging these for OpenShift Origin. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which is the major donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry.

roeme 11y ago

I think it's safe to invoke Betteridge's Law here. Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary). The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein. Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.

dilemma 11y ago
It's even older than mainframe vs microcomputers. It'd centralization vs distribution, and its the fundamental question to human life, which is necessarily social and therefore needs organization. Interestingly, the answer is always "both", just in different ways. AWS could be used as an example argue that technology and society is becoming more centralized, and that it is becoming more distributed. It's all about what your focus is.

rbanffy 11y ago

It depends. It's getting easier to assemble scalable we application out of IaaS offerings. OTOH, writing against, say, Google App Engine is not as simple as writing for Django or Flask. It's, however, educational.

jasoncartwright 11y ago
Agree, but there are tools to help. We maintain Djangae, to run Django on App Engine. https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae https://github.com/potatolondon/djangae

Aqueous 11y ago

We run applications for dozens of clients across several different language stacks on Heroku. Our entire (rapidly expanding) business depends on it. If we had to maintain those instances ourselves, it would require a full time dev ops employee, if not multiple. We've side-stepped the requirement for any dedicated devops staff by relying on Heroku's automation for this. So I really do not see how PaaS is even remotely close to dead. Those companies probably don't release glitzy PR bragging about their success (like most VC-funded companies trying to generate hype) because they don't need to - the money just keeps rolling in. If I start seeing PaaS companies vanishing inexplicably then I'll start to wonder.

dougbarrett 11y ago
I 100% agree. I was launching apps on linode and running into open file limit issues because of the amount of traffic the application was receiving. One server could handle the load find if it wasn't for that (as far as I knew at the time) but I tried launching it on Heroku and saw immediately there were no issues handling the traffic we were sending to it. It may not be the fastest or cheapest, but it was turning into the majority of my time spent on figuring out how to configure a server that could handle the traffic rather than me focusing on actual development. The added monthly cost is a fraction of the cost it would take me to actively manage the servers. People thought that the price changes a few months ago would be the death of Heroku but in reality we are saving money compared to what we were playing previously.
- ownagefool 11y ago
  You should be able to change the file handle limit without much effort? I'm not saying you made the wrong choice, if you don't have some pretty deep sysadmin skills, you should probably be outsourcing your hosting, but that seems like a weird justification. All that really matters is Heroku is cheaper than people. When it no longer is, you start thinking about hiring.
mattmanser 11y ago
You'd need a full time devops staff, but you can run your stuff on heroku? I very much doubt it. This just comes across as you vastly over-estimating how hard it is to run a server. Most of the time it's painful, you take a day or two to write a build script, then everyone forgets about it because it's fully automated.

andysinclair 11y ago

I disagree, I think PaaS is in its infancy and will grow not die. One PaaS not mentioned in the article, Microsoft Azure, is growing fast and provides a vast range of services. We run an enterprise grade SaaS product on PaaS, and I personally have several apps running on PaaS. These solutions would have taken much longer to get to market without PaaS and be much more complex to manage and maintain.

tyre 11y ago
Seconded. Post also does not mention AWS. Starting a government-focused startup, their FedRAMP certification is invaluable. No way we could go through that process (multiple years, tens-hundreds of thousands of dollars) and make an affordable product. Author did make a good point about devs being problem solvers who want to do it themselves. A great sign of a truly senior engineer is focus on the outcomes and offloading the non-business-critical things. (This isn't to say DevOps isn't important, but unless your business relies on innovative ops as a core piece of what it offers, don't spend time on that.)

joshmn 11y ago

I cannot imagine how many startups would have failed to successfully launch (as they had) if it wasn't for the ease-of-use of hosting their platform, such as Heroku. I know that early on I wouldn't have had the patience/confidence to roll my own stack on a node, let alone trust its integrity.

leftwich 11y ago
I'm not a developer and use Heroku to host my site. It would be a major inconvenience for me if PaaS went away. I imagine there are enough others like me that will keep these companies around awhile.

mkozlows 11y ago

A look at the PaaS landscape that doesn't mention AWS (Elastic Beanstalk) or Azure is a very weird look. Why is it getting harder for randos to succeed in PaaS? Because they're competing with Amazon and Microsoft, and that's hard.

Aqueous 11y ago
I think beyond it simply being difficult to compete with AWS and Microsoft, the more specific reason is that those providers (plus the smaller ones that are probably also thriving) all support pretty much any language / configuration you can throw it them, so the barrier of entry is too high. For a new PaaS start-up to compete you'd need automate the provisioning and deployment of dozens of different languages out of the gate, or support at least one of these stacks much, much better than any of the existing PaaS too, such that it makes it the obvious choice for that language. WPEngine would be an example of a PaaS that specializes in a single stack better than any of the multi-stack players. Heroku too started off as a PaaS specialist for Ruby on Rails, and now has expanded to supporting many languages and configurations. If you specialize you have a shot at besting AWS or Azure - if your goal is to support all of the existing stacks plus new ones, then forget it.
- lnanek2 11y ago
  Not to mention you have to beat their prices too. AWS and Microsoft are expected to keep prices low to keep out competition.
  - analognoise 11y ago
    Or are they leveraging their resources to provide a capable service at a lower cost? Two huge players (and other competition) seems like a healthy space, unless they're colluding.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Colluding to keep prices low? Usually it's the other way around.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I am a paying Heroku customer and I used to use AppEngine a fair mount. I would argue that both of these PaaS are doing well. I don't think the article even mentioned AppEngine.

surprised 11y ago

In terms of market cap, how do Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, and Azure compare with Heroku? Can we really make a claim on the PaaS landscape without talking about some of the biggest players? I'd be very curious to know how the 4 mentioned services are doing.

nl 11y ago

I think the Docker based self-hosted PAASs (Deis, Flynn etc) is squeezing the smaller PAAS offering at the low end, and Elastic Beanstalk/Azure/Google CloudDB is killing it at the high end. Why would you use <insert random small PAAS company> when you can deploy your own on AWS and then use their managed DB service?

jolux 11y ago

Paas dead? And heading right into the easter season, too. :(

jacques_chester 11y ago

This got passed around at work. The problems are: 1. PaaS is such a good idea that everyone is building their own. Even though the field has matured -- Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are already available and supported by major vendors. 2. The author cherrypicked a selection of failed small vendors as the marker of the trend. By this logic every single technological advance of the past 100 years is dead. Meanwhile, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has the fastest-growing sales of any opensource product in history. What I agree with: PaaSes don't get love from techies because we like to tinker. We always assume we can do better. We often can, and for special cases PaaSes may not be suitable. But large organisations with heterogenous teams and apps, PaaSes are godsend. Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry.

ebrewste 11y ago

I'm a user of Heroku, and I went in with the idea that the add ins (DBs, notification, logging, etc.) offerings would be super easy to use and compelling to stay in the eco system. They are super easy to use, but I learned that so are their competitors, and they don't integrate into Heroku in a compelling way. I ended up with a DBaaS that was miles more expensive than the AWS competitor that I will switch to when I get a chance. The base Heroku service, while not super cheap is one of the few pieces of my puzzle that may not change. AWS EB is probably better than the Heroku dynos, but not so much that it's on my short list of things to do.

programminggeek 11y ago

Good news PaaS is dead, so it will start making buckets of money!

arihant 11y ago

No mention of App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry, Parse, Firebase. The only company I recognize from that list is Heroku. If you do not even talk about market leaders in a space, you're almost guaranteed to form an inaccurate opinion. That said, if the point he is trying to make that newcomers aren't there or aren't innovating, that's wrong too. PaaS is not moving at the slow rate that traditional hosting went through. So the term Gartner defines goes out of date before they publish their reports. There has been plenty innovation by Parse, Firebase, Compose, Mongo in 2015. IBM Bluemix came to the scene with great modularity and Watson as a service. Google brought in a bunch of new stuff too. Docker didn't kill PaaS, that's like saying LAN wires killed servers. It just pushed the level of abstraction in PaaS a bit higher. Being able to throw code and being able to run it without thinking of hardware is a very 2014 problem for most people. The sex is in what's coming next. PaaS has evolved.

discodave 11y ago
Also, is AWS Lambda PaaS? Or something else?
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Lambda is something new. It's akin to BaaS (backend-as-a-service, like Parse or Firebase), but operates fairly differently from them, and doesn't have the mobile focus. Not sure if I'd lump it under BaaS or if it's an entirely new category (EaaS, execution-as-a-service?).
  - krakensden 11y ago
    How is it something new? It seems a lot like App Engine to me, albeit with less tooling.
    - nostrademons 11y ago
      The interface to the outside world is different, the granularity of abstraction is different, and the pricing model is different. All those make it suitable for different applications, which indicates it's a new market and not going after the same customers as a PaaS. AppEngine still treats your whole codebase as an "app" - all your handlers share configuration, they share a data store, and you interact with them over straight HTTP or XMPP. You're billed per instance-hour, which implies instances (virtual machines), and the control panel is setup to scale the number of instances devoted to your app. Lambda is just a collection of functions, and you setup those functions to be triggered on various events. Those events could include HTTP requests to an API gateway, but they also include S3 or DynamoDB writes, Cloudwatch monitoring, SNS, and a wide variety of other apps. You're billed only for computing time; having an Amazon Lambda function uploaded that's doing nothing costs you nothing. I get the sense that Amazon Lambda : database triggers :: Google AppEngine : webapps. The former is utility code that glues together events in multiple storage systems; the latter is designed to serve a single application and interface with all of its data needs.

SFjulie1 11y ago

Was PaaS ever alive? Technically that stuff works yes. As much as driver service on demand exists for people who don't want to own a car or learn how to drive it and do not want to walk, use a bike and don't care about parking space. As long as investors are over investing. It is living on perfusion. I mean PaaS as a business? PaaS/IaaS is overly ridiculously expensive for competent team. It is usable for companies who do not care about the OPEX... the costs of resources ... the costs of not hiring competent dev/sysadmins. We are in recession, the source of investments is gonna run dry, so I guess it is time to see PaaS users' slowly bankrupt while the cheap competitors will survive. Business is a harsh world for those who do not care about costs and prices.

TheLogothete 11y ago
We are in what?

iamleppert 11y ago

Wow I never knew the Nodejitsu guys became part of Godaddy: "Nodejitsu has joined GoDaddy We are excited to join GoDaddy to help spearhead their largest Node.js product: Website Builder." That has got to be the saddest acquisition I've ever heard.

esher 11y ago

Article author here. Thanks for all the feedback. Many of you missed the big players like Azure, AWS (Lambda & Elastic Beanstalk), Google App Engine … Well, that's true. Due to my perspective I am mostly interested in the "bootstrapability" of the business model here: What are our companions are doing?

Maarten88 11y ago
> I am mostly interested in the "bootstrapability" of the business model here By that definition I can see how you think it's dead. I'm afraid the opportunity for that went away several years ago, by now all the early innovators were bought by big vendors. It seems like an awfully capital-intensive and global business to me.

gnuchu 11y ago

Interesting attempt to spell Czech.

golergka 11y ago

> PaaS is a black-box; it's proprietary; it's a beautiful island; it's not as versatile as a home-grown solution. Developers love the freedom of root access, they want to able install any open-source software they like. While PaaS is offering well defined and thoughtful solutions. Wow, there's a lot of fancy talk to avoid the phrase "vendor lock-in" here.