I encourage you to check out this very provocative blog post by Forrester Research analyst John Rymer over on Forrester.com, in which he describes what he calls “Adaptive PaaS.” John proposes that the ‘usual suspect’ PaaS offerings have failed to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise users for a variety of factors, and that a new generation of PaaS solutions is coming to the fore which offer the efficiencies of PaaS, but without the negatives associated with this initial crop of PaaS offerings. (I will be hosting John for a webinar on this topic next week; Please join us!)
Of particular interest to John is the ability for this new breed of PaaS offerings to help users adapt existing applications, tools, processes and skill-sets to the cloud, thus the name “adaptive.” Quoting John’s blog:
- Adaptive PaaS adapts conventional application code to the elastic scaling and multitenancy of cloud architectures. Developers don’t have to use special APIs or languages (like salesforce.com’s Apex) to create apps for the cloud. They code as they always have.
- Adaptive PaaS adapts conventional servers and storage to provide “cloud” services by providing application, database, and/or file virtualization services. Some of the early adopters of adaptive PaaS use the software to implement internal clouds.
The ideas John presents in his post are very complimentary to those expressed in my earlier post, The Essential Characteristics of PaaS. In fact, my post could have been titled the Essential Characteristics of Adaptive PaaS — in that post and the article on which it was based, I strongly allude to a new style of PaaS offering (obvious example being Appistry’s CloudIQ Platform) that doesn’t carry the baggage of the “traditional” PaaS offerings.
I think John is on the right track with “adaptive PaaS” and I’m looking forward to further industry discussion around these important ideas.
Please post your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to register for the webinar!
Sam Charrington on Cloud Computing