
Is PaaS dead? - esher
http://blog.fortrabbit.com/cloudscapes-rerevisited
======
arihant
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 So the term Gartner defines goes out of date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
Also, is AWS Lambda PaaS? Or something else?

~~~
nostrademons
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
How is it something new? It seems a lot like App Engine to me, albeit with
less tooling.

~~~
nostrademons
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.

------
Aqueous
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.

~~~
mattmanser
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.

~~~
steveklabnik
It's not about difficulty, it's about time and money.

I _can_ manage a server. But for $25/month to just forget about it? I'll take
that tradeoff any time. (And have, back when I had production machines myself.
And will, if I have time for that side project again sometime soon...)

And for stuff that needs more than one dyno, well, if we assume $100k/year for
an ops person, that still gives you sixteen of Heroku's beefiest instances for
the same price? I still think it makes sense.

~~~
shubhamjain
Why to assume that any kind of server setup would need a dedicated Ops guy? It
is reasonable to assume that once a server is provisoned, all you need is to
have familiarity with tools and how things work to resolve issues.

I know I might be oversimplifying but the decision is not always simple as "we
save one hire". Seeing many articles on the web, PaaS bills rake up more
quickly than anyone expects.

~~~
Kaizyn
PaaS bills are OpEx, so you get to write them all off on your taxes.

~~~
mifreewil
Yes, you pay less in taxes because your expenses are higher and now have less
profit to be taxed.

------
mkozlows
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.

~~~
arethuza
I don't know about AWS, but Azure strongly recommends PaaS over IaaS (i.e.
VMs).

~~~
jakejake
In my experience you pay a ton more for the same amount of resources when it's
PaaS so it makes sense that providers are going to push that over just
configuring your own blank VMs.

~~~
Maarten88
I think with Azure the costs for basic compute services are about the same,
you can run the same code on Iaas (Virtual Machines) or Paas (Cloud Services,
App Services) and the costs are the same for equivalent performance.

For more complex products it's probably different, but the value of that is
also higher. Just clicking Azure Search and simply start using it is a lot
simpler then setting up your own Elastic Search cluster and having to manage
it.

------
andysinclair
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
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.)

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spo81rty
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
> why?

because have more time than money.

~~~
spo81rty
Azure App Services and AWS Elastic Bean Stalk aren't any more expensive than
the same size VMs.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, but AWS VMs are expensive overall.

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iamleppert
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.

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roeme
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
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.

------
nl
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?

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gamesbrainiac
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.

~~~
pbreit
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.

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golergka
> 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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

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joshmn
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
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.

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jacques_chester
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.

------
SFjulie1
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
We are in what?

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wstrange
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
> _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.

------
esher
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
> 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.

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ebrewste
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.

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surprised
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.

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rbanffy
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
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)

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

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

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gnuchu
Interesting attempt to spell Czech.

