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having worked on cloud foundry platform in the past, paas was extremely exciting at the time (2012), we even came up with something called warden which was way

having worked on cloud foundry platform in the past, paas was extremely exciting at the time (2012), we even came up with something called warden which was way before docker. but since then, i have to ask, is there really that much benefit to having a paas? i understand the arguments about not needing to have devops/sre's, etc, but i think iaas works just fine, sure there's the initial plumbing for things like load balancers, installing an operating system, upgrading/patching that operating system, securing all the network connections, but it's not an everyday task. cloud foundry at the time required a minimum of 20 vm's to get the environment running (cloud controller, bosh, service nodes, dea's, nats, etc), and these weren't your t1 micro aws machines, these were memory and processor hungry instances; to manage the entire environment required a team of sre's and devops. nice to see that flynn only requires 3 nodes minimally, but as the environment scales, you'll need more nodes and i wonder how the overhead scales with flynn. obviously for small environments (let's say 6 vm's, an additional 3 vm's to support flynn is not ideal). but if you get up into the 20+ vm arena, perhaps the overhead starts to pale in comparison? perhaps it's just me, but the devops part isn't that annoying, yet, but i've got an ultra small environment running nginx, golang binaries, and some services like rdb and k-v store.

epynonymous 10y ago
not sure why this was down voted, but whatever, my questions remain and if anyone is willing to answer, i'd appreciate that.
- duncanawoods 10y ago
  Looks like a decent question, I upvoted. I think the main motivation compared to IAAS is to run on your own choice of machine e.g. on-premise or dedicated from OVH/Hetzner, or across different cloud providers while not incurring the full admin overhead of baremetal. The reasons can be portability, control, performance, privacy or the potential for 1-2 orders of magnitude cost-savings. And yes, scale, high availability, self-healing, auto-scaling & load balancing is where the admin pain comes in.
  - epynonymous 10y ago
    thanks duncan for the reply, i am still not sold on paas as a long term solution, my reasoning being as such, companies like google that have their own paas (gae), don't even use it to run large portions of their own infrastructure. take for instance, facebook as well, they do not use paas as far as i'm aware for major portions of their sites, and i would say that those 2 companies are representative of extreme scale. so why wouldn't a company of this scale need/want paas? i guess part of it is that they can afford sres and devops, but the counter-argument would be that if they could do without sres/devops, why wouldn't they? i guess what i don't like about most paas is the fact that you lose some level of control over the environment for the sake of convenience and bliss, but at the end of the day, someone has to fix all those bugs in your paas layer.
    - duncanawoods 10y ago
      I think you could describe the systems that google/fb use internally as paas despite not being externally facing - they have internal teams supporting a platform that then hosts apps and services from 100s-1000s of teams. I know what you mean about control but things like kubernetes were developed for Google's internal paas so they do kind of have control despite the level of abstraction. For us normal people at more human levels of scale - I agree its wise to be skeptical - serve your users in the simplest manner and don't get sucked into HN hype. Its easy to get an infrastructure inferiority complex :)

epynonymous 10y ago

not sure why this was down voted, but whatever, my questions remain and if anyone is willing to answer, i'd appreciate that.

duncanawoods 10y ago
Looks like a decent question, I upvoted. I think the main motivation compared to IAAS is to run on your own choice of machine e.g. on-premise or dedicated from OVH/Hetzner, or across different cloud providers while not incurring the full admin overhead of baremetal. The reasons can be portability, control, performance, privacy or the potential for 1-2 orders of magnitude cost-savings. And yes, scale, high availability, self-healing, auto-scaling & load balancing is where the admin pain comes in.
- epynonymous 10y ago
  thanks duncan for the reply, i am still not sold on paas as a long term solution, my reasoning being as such, companies like google that have their own paas (gae), don't even use it to run large portions of their own infrastructure. take for instance, facebook as well, they do not use paas as far as i'm aware for major portions of their sites, and i would say that those 2 companies are representative of extreme scale. so why wouldn't a company of this scale need/want paas? i guess part of it is that they can afford sres and devops, but the counter-argument would be that if they could do without sres/devops, why wouldn't they? i guess what i don't like about most paas is the fact that you lose some level of control over the environment for the sake of convenience and bliss, but at the end of the day, someone has to fix all those bugs in your paas layer.
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    I think you could describe the systems that google/fb use internally as paas despite not being externally facing - they have internal teams supporting a platform that then hosts apps and services from 100s-1000s of teams. I know what you mean about control but things like kubernetes were developed for Google's internal paas so they do kind of have control despite the level of abstraction. For us normal people at more human levels of scale - I agree its wise to be skeptical - serve your users in the simplest manner and don't get sucked into HN hype. Its easy to get an infrastructure inferiority complex :)