Summary Bullets:
- 2014 will be the year PaaS providers need to demonstrate their cloud success through customer wins.
- Red Hat is relentless in its challenge to Pivotal Cloud Foundry through continued PaaS enhancements.
Following a flurry of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) events this year, 2014 is the year for application platform providers to button down customer wins and prove they’ve got cloud offerings that deliver on the goods. The PaaS area of cloud computing, in which customers have been slow to adopt, holds the promise of significantly easing and speeding application development and deployment through self-service capabilities, elasticity, and multi-tenancy.
Open source has surfaced as an increasingly attractive option among PaaS and IaaS strategies, and the OpenStack cloud computing project has become more prevalent among vendors’ cloud strategies as a cloud platform for private and public clouds. Open source’s main attraction is its promise of helping enterprises avoid vendor lock-in when they want to move their applications and app development between various clouds.
Of the open source PaaS leaders, Red Hat has not let up in efforts to challenge chief rival Pivotal, a VMware cloud spinoff which has experienced early success around its Cloud Foundry PaaS offering. Red Hat’s latest enterprise on-premises PaaS version, OpenShift Enterprise 2, addresses key IT operations issues with a new administration console for better visibility into cloud activities as well as simplified data center integration. The newest version also expands platform/language support including Node.js and JavaScript (please see Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 2 Faces Mounting PaaS Competition, December 4, 2013).
Red Hat differentiates from competitors in a number of ways: it provides an on-premises/hybrid cloud model which includes its own virtualization through KVM VMs as an alternative to VMware for a lower TCO; it supports a full middleware stack, JBoss; and its roots are in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, an operating system being heavily utilized for running workloads in the cloud environment.
PaaS vendors have their work cut out for them in 2014, namely cloud-enabling and integrating their application infrastructure technologies such as in-memory database and mobile app platforms, to remain competitive in a heated cloud market.
IT Connection 