Rishidot Research

deciphering the modern enterprise

platform services

Briefing Notes: Cloudsoft AMP

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This is a briefing note prepared by me on Cloudsoft AMP, a DevOps platform services player offering autonomic management of applications.

Overview:

Cloudsoft AMP is an enterprise application management platform that helps automate the process based on business and performance needs. Deploying an application on any cloud or PaaS is just one part of the application lifecycle management. There are many other aspects of the lifecycle that are equally important. For example, management, monitoring, governance, portability, etc. play a critical role in enterprise IT. Cloudsoft AMP adds a layer of abstraction to platforms/platform services making autonomic management of applications much easier in enterprise IT environments.

Read the report below

Disclosure: Cloudsoft Corporation is a client and sponsor of Deploycon
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Webinar: Dissecting The PaaS Landscape

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Webinar: Dissecting the PaaS LandscapeDeploycon 2013 is fast approaching and we want to build the necessary foundation for the conversation before we get together at Santa Clara Convention Center on April 2nd. We are in the process of preparing a research report on PaaS landscape and we want to talk about it before Deploycon. In order to do that, we are running a webinar based on the report. I will be talking about what we see in the PaaS landscape and help enterprise executives, IT and developers get a full understanding of the fast evolving PaaS landscape. If you are interested in getting the big picture of PaaS market segment, this webinar is suitable for you.

What: Webinar on Dissecting The PaaS Landscape

When: March 25th 2013 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM PST

Where: Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2088100473212175872 and you will be notified about how to access the webinar

Please note that the space is limited for this webinar. We will however try to post the recording on the Rishidot Research blog. All the attendees (you need to attend the webinar) will get a discount code for Deploycon after the event. Everyone who registers for the webinar will get a copy of our report when it is published on April 2nd 2013. Please note that the report will not be send to personal email addresses and we need the work email for sending the report. Please register for the webinar with your official email address. Looking forward to seeing you at the webinar.

Rap Genius Flap And PaaS Visibility

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Image Source: Successful Workplace

Recently, a startup called Rap Genius and Heroku went back and forth on whether Heroku intentionally misled their customers about the resources underneath their PaaS platform. Having known Heroku for a long time and the fact that Salesforce will not want a PR mishap on such an issue, I personally feel that Heroku may not have intentionally misled their customers. Without going into the validity of claims and counterclaims in this case, I want to use the story to talk about a bigger point, i.e. hosted PaaS visibility.

The idea behind hosted PaaS to abstract away all the complexities of the infrastructure and give developer one push access to deploy their applications. By using hosted PaaS, developers need not worry about provisioning and management of the underlying infrastructure and focus just on application development and deployment. It was very appealing to many developers wanting to go from idea to production faster than anytime in the past (agile development). However, this level of abstraction comes at a cost to developers. They have very little leverage when it comes to knowing what is under the hood. For some organizations, this lack of transparency can be frightening.

Let us now shift gears and go back in time by few years. In the early days of cloud computing, lack of transparency on the part of cloud providers were cited as one of the concerns against public clouds. Those concerns were mainly from the security angle, lack of transparency was worrisome for many in IT. To help ease those concerns, a group of security pundits headed by Chris Hoff came up with the idea of CloudAudit. In my opinion, it was a great idea with a potential to make public clouds more palatable to the enterprises. But they were little bit early in the game and it eventually lost traction and got folded into Cloud Security Alliance.

I see similarities between the lack of (performance related) transparency in PaaS and lack of (security related) transparency in clouds (in general). Yes, Heroku was offering monitoring services as an add-on which could help their customers gain more visibility into the service. Other hosted PaaS vendors offer similar solutions. However, as seen in the Heroku-Rap Genius flap, it doesn’t always help. It is difficult for PaaS customers to bring in their own monitoring tools so that they can trust PaaS completely. Such a trust is critical for large scale adoption of hosted PaaS offerings. Especially for enterprises, PaaS visibility is one of the key requirements (both in terms of performance and security) for the use of hosted PaaS offerings for mission critical applications.

At Deploycon 2013, we are dedicating a session to discuss PaaS visibility with some of the hosted PaaS vendors and industry leaders. If you are a startup or enterprise wanting to use PaaS for your IT needs, it is important you think about PaaS visibility as a part of your platform strategy. The session at Deploycon will help customers understand the issue better and also learn about the right strategy going forward. Check the Deploycon website early next week to learn more and register.

Briefing Notes: Apprenda

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This is a briefing notes prepared by me on Apprenda, a private PaaS vendor focused on best of breed approach with .NET and Java

Overview:

Apprenda is one of the early private PaaS players with a focus on best of breed technology. After an initial focus on .NET, Apprenda is diversifying into other languages with the Java support announcement today. Relying on the enterprise need for a deeper .NET support (and now Java), they have gained strong traction in financial and biotech sectors. Today, they have announced that J P Morgan Chase is using Apprenda platform for their mission critical needs.

 

To download the briefing note, you need to sign up as a free subscriber. Check out this page for signing up as a free subscriber. Once you sign up for your account and log in, you will see a download link to the briefing note.

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Download Link: https://rishidotver3.wpengine.com/?s2member_file_download=RishidotResearchBriefingNotesApprenda.pdf
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PaaS Pivot: Big Data At The Core Of Platform Services

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As we go into 2013, I keep thinking about the evolution of the Platform as a Service and wonder what is in store for this segment this year. As Platform Services are one of my core focus areas of research, I thought I will start off this year with a post on this topic. For the past year or so, I have been advocating the need to rethink PaaS offerings in order to fully take advantage of the big data paradigm. I use the term Intelligent Platforms to describe next generation platform services built around big data. In my opinion, we are going to see a pivot in the PaaS market where the focus will shift from the application development platforms focussed on scaling users and meeting the resource demands of large loads to building a robust platform to take advantage of vast amounts of data organizations have or going to acquire in the future.

Intelligent Apps Ver 1

Historically, platform as a service offerings were focussed on modern web applications that handle “smaller quantities” of data. In some cases, PaaS was used for applications that handle (or make use of) large volumes of data. But, in my opinion, most of these applications on these platforms were just scratching the surface. In reality, the PaaS offerings were not built to meet the needs of data hungry organizations. In 2012, PaaS vendors understood the changing needs of enterprises and were slowly starting to focus on the big data use cases. At the same time, we also saw the emergence of big data applications which were built on top of big data infrastructure platforms like Hadoop. As enterprises understand the full impact of big data and start building apps to take advantage of data (collected across the length and breadth of these organizations), they will really feel the need for more sophisticated platform services that run on top of big data infrastructure.

Vendors like Continuuity are trying to attack this problem. VMware’s CloudFoundry spinoff seems to be heading in this direction. In 2013, we are going to see the emergence of more such players and we will also see most of the existing PaaS vendor take steps to boost their platform services so that they are capable of supporting big data applications. Keep in mind that whatever we have seen so far with regards to “big data applications” are mostly focussed on analytics and visualization. What we are going to see in the future are set of services built on top of Intelligent Platforms that will go beyond simple analytics. We are going to see applications (services) that are self evolving and which can tweak itself based on the insights gleaned from various data sources (including the data these applications themselves produce). The underlying platform services needed to support such sophisticated services are going to be much more complex underneath than what we are seeing among the PaaS vendors today.

In short, 2013 will be the year when platform vendors are moving towards building platform services suitable for intelligent self evolving applications (services) of the future. All these services are going to be centered around data. Not just business and governments but the entire human society is going to rely on the data driven services with unprecedented complexity and automation underneath. The key for any vendor in the space is to build Intelligent Platforms that mask all these complexities and offer a simple interface for developers.

PS: The image in the blog post was a simplistic diagram I put forward to highlight the evolution from the current generation of PaaS to the next gen Intelligent Platforms.

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