Open Platform as a Service

Open PaaS empowers developers and businesses to deploy, run and scale their applications on private, public and hybrid clouds without having to directly deal with the maintanance and operation of underlaying operating systems, application servers, databases and frameworks.

In the cloud era, more and more developers are running their applications on top of Amazon's Beanstalk, CloudBees, Google's App Engine, Microsoft's Azure Platform, Slaesforce's Heroku and some other smaller or lesser known providers such as Jelastic and ActiveState's Stackato hosted by ServInt, dogado Internet & HostEurope or on HP Public Cloud. Since these public PaaS environments only provide support for few languages and their closed source nature doesn't allow to avoid Vendor-Lock-In and provide support for additional languages and frameworks, other companies like VMware and RedHat understood the need for openness and decided to provide their Cloud Foundry and OpenShift PaaS products as open source to the public and Google supports the development of Appscale platform, so that developers can run their own PaaS environment on their own laptops or on their own private Open PaaS environments behind their own firewalls.

Open PaaS and the agony of choice

Open PaaS provides all benefits of classic public PaaS solutions without the Vendor-Lock-In, but not all Open PaaS solutions are created unique and support the choice of language and the platform stack and provide support for interoperability to move application code and data from one vendor or environment to others. Choosing an Open PaaS solution depends on the choice of cloud for deployment, the language and farmeworks for development and application servers and services to support continuous intergration and build management support for the QA teams. Some Open PaaS offerings like OpenShift support the continuous intergration process for developer productivity and development processes at best, some others provide better support for performance and scalability for auto-scaling of app servers and databases, that's why it might be worth to compare Open PaaS solutions with regard to the following constraints which have been defined in this nice article "A Java Developers's Guide to PaaS" written by Dr. Michael Yuan on InfoQ:

• Supported Technology Platforms and Stacks
• Support for Developer Productivity and Development Processes
• Performance and Scalability
• Pricing and Business Concerns

Open PaaS Comparison

As you can read in the article mentioned above, RedHat's OpenShift could become the best choice among Open PaaS offerings for Java EE developers, Cloud Foundry ist focused on Spring and Ruby support. Appscale is not mentioned at all in this article, but from our point of view, we foresee a great future for Appscale, since Google, IBM Research and the National Science Foundation are the official sponsors of Appscale and we guess in the near future more and more companies will build their private Open PaaS environments on top of Appscale and would have the freedom to jump on Google's App Engine cloud and get back into their own Appscale powered Open PaaS cloud, if desired or necessary due to cost or security concerns! Not to forget WSO2 Stratos, the software behind the WSO2 StratosLive Java PaaS supports multi-tenant and single-tenants models with user identity mnagement and metering, reporting and billing support! The next emerging player in the private PaaS market is CumuLogic which supports Single Click Deployment, Scaling and management of Java and Spring applications in clouds and virtualized environments.

The Open Platform as a Service Scorecard

coming soon :-)

The Future lies in Openness

Open minds believe in openness and our cloudy world needs the openness for a better life in a democratized sunny world, the sun shines always on Open Clouds!