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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

Page 4 of 7

CloudBees lists its reference customers publicly. The company pointed to one in particular, Lose It, which generates up to 25,000 transactions per minute on the CloudBees platform. It seems this company only has four employees: two in software development and two in marketing, with zero in IT. CloudBees pointed out that this is the type of "extreme productivity" possible only in the cloud.

How did it do? To get our Granny application running, CloudBees required a simple deploy from a Web page using a "free" trial account. Getting the app to use a CloudBees-provided instance of MySQL required provisioning an instance and changing the data source descriptor to use CloudBees' JDBC driver and the appropriate JDBC URL. Although the Web GUI doesn't make it clear, CloudBees allows you to automatically override the data sources with its command-line interface in a manner similar to Cloud Foundry's IDE.

Conclusions. Due to its simple deployment process and reasonable pricing and service-level agreements, we think CloudBees is a good choice for deploying Java applications, legacy or not. It's at a disadvantage from a business standpoint in that it doesn't have the relationships with existing customers in the manner of VMware or Red Hat. On the other hand, CloudBees isn't stuck with these companies' management structures and compensation models, either. This should allow it to be more agile in attracting new customers to the cloudy world of PaaS.

 Google App Engine
Google App Engine (GAE) is Google's PaaS. Initially released all the way back in 2008, it's relatively mature compared to other PaaS offerings. App Engine supports Java, Python, and Google's Go language.

Differentiators. Hey, it's Google. GAE offers the same APIs that Google uses for deploying its own applications. The pricing model allows you to pay only for what you use, and the minimums appear to be cheaper than other vendors. Google's SLA also appears to beat the competition. Moreover, App Engine runs on Google's infrastructure. Most other PaaS offerings are front-ending Amazon.

Lock-in. Google's PaaS seems to be the most proprietary of all. We're talking serious lock-in, as in "download this to CSV and fix your code not to use Google's APIs." Ouch!

Security. Google App Engine is SAS70 (now SSAE16 and ISAE 3402) compliant.

Who's using it? Google sees mobile, Web, and gaming companies as being prime candidates. Google publishes an impressive list of customers that include companies like Pulse, Best Buy, Khan Academy, and Ubisoft.

How did they do? We couldn't get Granny to work on App Engine despite spending nearly five times as many minutes/hours we spent on the others. Google provides Spring examples, but the example apps are more simply structured than our application, which was originally based on the Spring Tool Suite IDE template.

Conclusions. Google's SLA is the best. This alone is why many companies we've worked with have chosen App Engine. Also, App Engine is mature. However, App Engine might not be our first choice for a legacy app, considering the amount of work we might have to do. We'd be even more concerned about lock-in for new apps. We'd want to do a lot more due diligence to prove we weren't stuck. When your stock price is $718 per share, investors are going to look to you to provide that value somewhere. Companies who base their entire infrastructure on you and can never leave would be one way you could do that in the long run.

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