April 29th, 2010
Dependant upon your common spoken language you may read the title of this post in your head a bit weirdly, it basically is supposed to read “I’m passing out” which means ”starting to lose consciousness”, all of this being in jest of course, its just my reaction to yet another PaaS offering with the announcement of a partnership between Salesforce and Vmware to create VMforce.
PaaS emergence
I have written in the past about large quantities about Cloud computing layers, out of all these the PaaS layer opens my eyes up the most as to what Cloud based IT strategy is starting to evolve into in. With the benefits currently today of PaaS and the level of power (and potential carnage) I am starting to think that IT is going to change dramatically in the next 5-10 Years. Changes will occur with how we perform RFIs, setup SLA’s agreements with both our business customers and the provider, define the architectural governance and policy, define roadmap and also how operationally IT responds to the dynamic capability and architecture of a Cloud based computing approach.
The Transition
Changes won’t happen overnight by going and buying a PaaS solution, the reality is that several key measurements and governance processes need to be introduced that probably dont exist yet, before even contemplating a movement of application and services into a cloud, needless to say lack of this or more a lack of this being highlighted by everyone and anyone selling Cloud solutions worries me, and the industry needs to realise that Cloud won’t provide as much of a cost benefit as it is quotes if it strategy is not employed correctly. Being a realist, cost of IT matters a lot to me, I am responsible in my capacity for ensuring that technology investments are solid and they do not increase IT budgets both on the initial investments and then for ongoing operational costs, Governance and changes to current processes I feel will be required in some of the following areas to ensure cost base is controlled and successful strategy is employed;
- Code Optimisation – Throw poorly written and lazy code into a Metered cloud and it will end up costing you more money, developers will need to think thin and think economically when developing applications,
- Budget planning - Today if you experience poor performance with poor code you throw more Infrastructure resource at it. This resource (if virtualised) has been procured and is an available pool that can be used. In the Cloud because you have moved into an OPEX Pay per use model, budgeting can skew due to applications either consuming too much resource or taking longer to run,
- Testing and UAT – More emphasis will be required on testing the performance of an application targetted for Cloud than what is done in today’s world. I see emergence on testing being performed to ensure applications are more efficient rather than proving that they can scale to X amount of users and provide Y amount of resilience,
- Exit Clauses - The taboo of any hosted/outsourced agreement, this in my mind needs to apply in any agreement from day one as a defacto. Flexibility to be able to move between cloud providers and ensure that your data can be moved without vendor lock-in are paramount to achieving a beneficial cost reduction.
- RFI – Requesting information on what services can be offered by vendors/suppliers will be quite frankly a waste of time, if a cloud provider is a true cloud provider, sales “examples” and the gumph that comes with it should appear or be available to view on the providers website. RFIs will need to move into focusing less on the product and more on what the service being offered truly provides or more what it fails to provide,
- RFP - Quite a brash statement this one but in a cloud world is this going to be used? who is going to request and tender for a cloud based solution if my predictions on RFI becomes true?
As you can see i’ve noted just a few potential areas that may change dramatically when introducing IT strategy that is based around a cloud computing world. This is an exciting turning point for IT, I believe to succeed IT governance and policy control will still need to be emphasised strongly within IT departments in order for strategies to be successful and tangible. A lot of this process is done today but just needs to adapt to the model of Cloud computing, its an opportunity to not make the same mistakes made in previous incarnations of IT and lets hope this time its done right!
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One Response to “I’m PaaS’ing out……”
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Good blog post. I appreciate the focus on budget planning, testing, and exit clauses.
As an application platform in the Cloud, PaaS should facilitate Cloud characteristics (i.e. elastic scale, on-demand self service, resource pooling, and consumption based pricing). When attempting to achieve Cloud characteristics, development teams specify the following goals
• Ensure application satisfies consumer demand while maximizing resource utilization
• Scale workload processing and increase performance while minimizing infrastructure spend
• Allocate, provision, monitor, manage, and administer resources across multiple tenants, nodes, and locations
• Rapidly deploy on preferred topology that meets deterministic performance requirements (e.g., replication, utilization, latency, bandwidth, and coherency)
PaaS offerings can be evaluated and compared across the following criteria categories:
● Cloud Characteristics
● Cloud Dimensions
● Production Ready
● DevOps Activities and Phases
● Cloud Architecture
● Platform Services
● Programming Model
To learn more about the evaluation criteria, see http://blog.cobia.net/cobiacomm/2011/11/02/paas-evaluation-framework-for-cios-and-architects/