Submitted by admin on September 02, 2010
When everything can be a platform, then a service can also be a product. Agree? But be forewarned against the resulting gibberish.
It's not everyday that you can read about PaaS on top of cloud computing as a main topic. Part of the snub can be attributed to the ongoing public and private cloud debate which focuses on infrastructure, which is in turn a result of the cloud security paranoia. But as companies settle with their type of cloud deployment, it is inevitable that PaaS will become relevant again. Or we don't call it cycle.
Let's join Gartner's David Smith as he rants against the abuse of the terminology:
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while. Many of you who talk to me have probably heard it a few times already. A couple of recent discussions have prompted me to finally do it. First, Red Hat’s “PaaS” announcement which is not a PaaS but enabling technology that can be used to build one. But what really put me over the edge was a conversation about another vendor’s offering of "PaaS as a Product". To me this is as absurd as General Motors, who builds cars that can be used as taxis (and could be called ‘car as a service’ (or CaaS)) referring to their cars as "CaaS as a car" or "CaaS as a product".
For which he proposes,
A better term to describe what most people mean when they say PaaS is "middleware in the cloud". This doesn’t use the term platform as ambiguously and it makes no claims that anything is delivered as a service at that level. And when you want to actually mean services, we call it "Cloud Application Infrastructure services"
So what we basically have here is this. It is understandable that there's money to be made from cloud offerings but in the process, this has led us to a messy world of words, which is what happens when you break the cloud into chunks and components by which everything can then be 'productized'. [Forgive me. Hate that term, too. Marketing-speak.]
At the very least, we can remain vigilant against the various assaults driving cloud computing towards complexity masquerading as simplified cloud adoption entry aids. It's no guarantee that it would put an end to the confusion for we're bound to start another cycle that would probably be more Platform-centric than infrastructure, soon.
But between us, speak not of PaaS. You can call it middleware, as David suggests. Or, if you prefer something less-specific but more heartfelt, refer to is as I do. 'Special sauce'.
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