Have your platform & eat it too: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

According to the Juniper Research May 2014 report, Cloud Computing - Enterprise Markets: SaaS, PaaS & IaaS, 2014-2018, SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) will continue to be the dominant cloud business model. Gartner reports that Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the cloud market, but divides the industry by different subgroups. Gartner’s research estimates that during 2013 SaaS grew at a rate of 14.7 percent, infrastructure services (IaaS) at 5.5 percent, and application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at one percent. So how can enterprise IT teams determine what cloud delivery model fits with their use case? What are the analysts really telling us about the market?

First, A Definition by Exclusion

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a virtualized version of servers, storage, and networks sitting on top of the hardware layer 1. IaaS is dominated by virtualized workloads and the networking and storage services that support the workloads.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is an application, usually in a web browser, that is delivered in Layer 3. SaaS gets most of the cloud attention with big shot products Dropbox, Google Apps, Salesforce, and the like.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) sits in-between IaaS and SaaS. In the PaaS model, the cloud user creates software using tools and libraries from the cloud provider. The users control the software deployment and configuration settings while the provider supplies the IaaS: networks, servers, storage, and capacity to host the users’ application. With PaaS, cloud users can select the software and services they want to create and choose the management tools to maintain the software.

PaaS is in the eye of the beholder

Because PaaS covers the area where infrastructure services and the end applications meet, some PaaS providers offer software frameworks where users can customize software and bring multiple components together. For instance, Amazon Web Services has IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services but they do not label them by service offering.

“We don’t spend any time talking about the acronyms,” Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS, has told eWEEK when speaking about X-aaS,. “All those lines will get blurred over time.” For a deeper, slightly dated, look at Amazon vs. Google PaaS integrations, check out Dion Hinchcliff’s article here.

Today, with so many viable ways to subdivide the cloud market, customers need to evaluate their language, cloud provider and frameworks before jumping into bed with PaaS providers. For example Salesforce and Force.com have their own language and storage databases, which can lock in users. If they have to move to another PaaS or IaaS provider, their users will likely have to re-write their software for the new system.

How IaaS is changing: Price wars create user opportunities

IaaS is changing quickly, and has been getting attention with recent cloud price wars. The pricing competition continues because providers are able to drop prices from their savings on economies of scale, technology improvements, reduction in human costs, as well as data center energy savings.

In a well written article, Christopher Mims writes “if Amazon’s entire public cloud were a single computer, it would have five times more capacity than those of its next biggest 14 competitors—including Google—combined.” So the recent back-and-forth price cuts are putting the squeeze on mid-sized cloud offerings from Rackspace, Dimension Data, Softlayer, and HP.

The opportunity here is for cloud users. Lower costs, greater choice, and freedom from lock-in will benefit enterprises using cloud IaaS and PaaS. As IaaS providers compete to offer more capacity at lower costs, the cloud will grow from more interesting use cases.

How PaaS is changing: User control at a deeper level

Currently, most SaaS offerings are built on physical, existing hardware, deployed via traditional owned or leased datacenter equipment. Companies are just starting to deploy applications in the PaaS or the virtualization layer. The future of PaaS is the exciting part - Think of it as either a snapshot in time versus a motion picture. In the snapshot, right this minute, PaaS is used but not run on IaaS or with SaaS. In the broader motion picture, IaaS offerings will lead to increased PaaS, and PaaS offerings will create more IaaS and SaaS capabilities.

PaaS will likely transition from OS-based features to network-based features, meaning customers will gain control and management over their cloud resources without owning IaaS or data centers. PaaS will bring more assurances that cloud user information is local, controlled and secured. At CohesiveFT we “walk the walk” in cloud. We not only work with customers who use cloud IaaS, but we also want to be experts in cloud IaaS providers as well. We use IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to run our business.

We use Amazon’s AWS for our internal chat servers, project management, bug tracking system, and dev/test environments. We use Salesforce.com, and Google Apps, as well as our PaaS partners like AppZero and Eucalyptus.

Most importantly, we test out VNS3 in all of our potential cloud partners and target environments before we ever offer it to customers. Our cloud IaaS test areas include public, private, hybrid and managed hosting providers, including HP Cloud, Google GCE, AWS EC2 and VPC, Interoute, CloudSigma, GoGrid, Azure, Dimension Data, Equinix, VMware, Abiquo, Verizon vCloud, Verizon Terremark, IBM Softlayer, Flexiant, Elastic Hosts, GreenQloud and more to come.

Have your platform and eat it too

In the future, we’re also seeing the “cloud stack” evolve to blur IaaS and PaaS, even within our own network product. We have started working with Docker to create what could be called a “network platform.” What we’re doing is trying to give customers a way to create a common network across all IaaS providers and locations. It’s a way to expand a data center network on top of IaaS and the hardware layer. It’s creating a grey area of both IaaS and PaaS layers that cloud users can now control.

Essentially, it’s part of the trend of “PaaS-ification” of the network stack. The network platform gives users a new ability to do more networking at the IaaS level. It’s not competing with IaaS or PaaS per say, but it is a platform play. Cloud customers can choose all the IaaS things they want, in the places they want, plus with all the PaaS things they want in the places they want them, to fit a specific use cases. It’s customization for a customer win.

In the broader cloud environment, end users should not even notice PaaS. With PaaS, they will ultimately have faster, more flexible applications to help them in their lives and their work. The opportunity here is for cloud users. Lower costs, greater choice, and freedom from lock-in will benefit enterprises using cloud IaaS and PaaS. As IaaS providers compete to offer more capacity at lower costs, there will be more interesting use cases, and the cloud will grow.