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Which freaking PaaS should I use?

Seven leading platform-as-a-service clouds compared for Java development

By Andrew Oliver and Lifford Pinto, InfoWorld, 10/08/12

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Who's using it? Amazon also publishes its customer case studies. It's an impressive collection of customers ranging from Amazon (duh) to Netflix to Shazam. It's also very long.

How did it do? It was straightforward to deploy our Granny app. To get Granny working with Amazon RDS (MySQL) required provisioning the database via the Elastic Beanstalk wizard and changing the data source descriptors in our application to match. Unfortunately, our progress was blocked by a connection timeout that other people also seem to have encountered. Supposedly you can fix this by adding IP addresses to a security group. However, debugging this took longer than deploying on other PaaS offerings, so we gave up.

Conclusions. Amazon Elastic Beanstalk is a middle ground between an IaaS and a PaaS. It's one throat to choke, but it isn't the real thing. You're going to do all the things that a PaaS would do for you by yourself. If you're thinking of cloud but you haven't decided to "go all in" and make it to PaaS, this might be a good compromise while you get there technically or psychologically. But if you can, go all PaaS and pick something else.

 CloudBees
CloudBees was one of the first PaaS offerings aimed mainly at the Java developer. Another successful startup by members of the so-called JBoss mafia, CloudBees is backed by Matrix Partners, Marc Fleury, and Bob Bickel, and led by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey. CloudBees supports any JVM-based language or framework.

Differentiators. According to CloudBees, a key differentiator is that this is a PaaS company from the ground up, whereas most of the competitors are software vendors with a cloud play. As a proof point, CloudBees notes that neither Red Hat, Oracle, VMware, nor Microsoft has a production-ready for-pay public PaaS offering despite all four having made such an announcement more than a year ago. The implication is that these competitors know how to build, QA, and monetize software, but not a service.

Against "pure" cloud plays such as Heroku and Google App Engine, CloudBees cites its depth in Java as a key attraction. Indeed, this showed when deploying our legacy application. CloudBees also noted its integration of the CI tool, Jenkins, which allows you to develop "full circle" in the cloud from GitHub to build and deploy.

Lock-in. CloudBees doesn't see lock-in as an inherent issue. The company pointed out that Java PaaS providers tend to be based on open source application servers like Tomcat running on open source JDKs. This means you could take an app running on a pure play PaaS vendor and move it back on-premise very easily.

Security. CloudBees noted that while its PaaS is PCI compliant, your application should also be reviewed. CloudBees provides documentation of its security process and constantly reviews those processes. CloudBees offers additional security information under NDA.

Who's using it? CloudBees notes that in addition to startups and small companies "with no access to sophisticated IT staff and capital expenditures," adoption is being driven within larger companies by specific business units. In many cases, central IT isn't responsive enough to their needs, so the business units start working directly with PaaS providers.


For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

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