platform-as-a-service Archives - SD Times https://sdtimes.com/tag/platform-as-a-service/ Software Development News Wed, 10 May 2017 11:06:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.1 https://sdtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/bnGl7Am3_400x400-50x50.jpeg platform-as-a-service Archives - SD Times https://sdtimes.com/tag/platform-as-a-service/ 32 32 6 ways platform-as-a-service is giving developers superpowers https://sdtimes.com/aws/6-ways-platform-service-giving-developers-superpowers/ https://sdtimes.com/aws/6-ways-platform-service-giving-developers-superpowers/#comments Thu, 27 Apr 2017 17:00:13 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=24806 We asked developers, CTOs, entrepreneurs and consultants across the country to describe concrete ways in which PaaS has changed their development style. RELATED CONTENT: Three cloud PaaS trends to watch in a serverless world 1. Reducing headcount Rob Reagan, CTO of Text Request At Text Request, we’re able to also reduce headcount using Azure’s PaaS offerings. Without … continue reading

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We asked developers, CTOs, entrepreneurs and consultants across the country to describe concrete ways in which PaaS has changed their development style.

RELATED CONTENT: Three cloud PaaS trends to watch in a serverless world

1. Reducing headcount
Rob Reagan, CTO of Text Request

At Text Request, we’re able to also reduce headcount using Azure’s PaaS offerings. Without PaaS, we’d have to staff a very senior infrastructure and security expert. It’s pretty rare to find developers who really know how to harden servers. However, our developers are very familiar with hardening an application.

Azure really shines with PaaS, far outpacing Amazon. If you’re looking for IaaS, Amazon leaves Microsoft in the dust.

Note: There is likely a point where the cost curve for PaaS bends backwards. If you’re maintaining a site like Reddit and have a few hundred servers, an infrastructure team is probably cheaper than multiple PaaS services.

With PaaS like Azure Web Apps, I don’t stay awake at night worrying about network-level intrusions. Microsoft’s security experts at their Azure data centers are probably going to do a much better job than our comparatively smaller team.

2. Conserving startup cash flow
Peter Kirwan, CEO of Collexion, Inc.

My latest startup, Collexion, has built its entire product on PaaS. Our core features are built on AWS, but we have gone a lot farther than other companies by making the commitment to develop critical parts of our application architecture incorporating many specialized AWS applications.

For example, we use AWS’s Cloudsearch to index millions of items to increase performance and take the load off our database. There are other examples, like their AI tools and image recognition, that are pay-per-query via an API so that we use the platform but don’t manage any of the infrastructure. In addition to AWS, we integrate with third-party cloud-based applications through APIs, Zapier and IFTTT.

I made a strong push when founding the company to use as many PaaS and cloud applications to rent vs. build, which not only saves a massive amount of software development, but eliminates the need for 24/7 management of the site in the early stages of the company.

3. Accelerating HMI development
Kim Rowe, CEO and founder of RoweBots Ltd

PaaS allows us to accelerate analytics and human-machine interface (HMI) development, while still having embedded solutions that are secure and precisely meet embedded sensor requirements. For example, we built a concussion sensor demonstration in 30 calendar days with 2.5 developers. This would have been impossible without the Microsoft Azure framework.

The powerful analytics developed by the cloud vendors are readily available for a price, accelerating development by years in some cases, which is certainly a superpower.

A system that would have taken 6-8 months to complete can now be completed in 30 calendar days. An Azure system that will scale to multiple wireless routers and hundreds of end users is underway with an extra month of effort in total.

Our favorite tools are MQTT (a machine-to-machine connectivity protocol for IoT-type publish/subscribe messaging transport) and Azure — and we’re currently looking at Ayla, MediumOne and Watson for other clients.

4. Building a DevOps pipeline
Marek Sadowski, IoT advocate

As a Bluemix developer, I can spend more time on the business logic of the application itself. Before developing on Bluemix, a large amount of my time was unfortunately consumed by implementing container fixpacks, upgrades, etc. Now it is all provided for me. I have access to enterprise grade systems — regardless if I’m developing for a large corporation or a startup. Also, all of the configuration and the connectivity to the other elements of the system are elevated now — I use what is provided in the description of the service table.

As an architect, it is very easy to rely on the availability of the system. Simple scaling up (or down) mechanisms take care of the irregularities of traffic to my apps and services. Furthermore, there is no need for system administrators — this role is taken over by Bluemix as well.

If I deploy an application on Bluemix it can be reachable globally, and I can achieve this reach quickly without database administrators, system support teams or hardware engineers.

Finally, there is no need for upfront investment, so startups can now match large enterprises with access to infinite resources — paying for them as they go, starting small and growing with the user base and app usage flexibly and as needed.

Recently, I started to leverage DevOps services on Bluemix to automate deployment from development to test and to production. The production cycles are counted in single weeks instead of months or even quarters. So everything becomes very efficient. The most modern languages (Javascript, Swift) and standards and concepts (cognitive services, Kubernetes, serverless computing) also become instantly available to my team.

5. Faster prototyping
Hernan Santiesteban, Founder of Great Lakes Development Group

PasS has definitely changed the way I build software. The ability to quickly get a system up that contains all the necessary tools is a great time-saver. I mainly work with Azure, but the same can be said for most of the cloud services providers. With PaaS tools, you can get a fully functional web application up in just a few minutes. This includes all the basic necessities like a database, web API scaffolding and authentication.

The ease with which you can get a system up makes prototyping a breeze. This gives you ability to focus on the problem you’re trying to fix. No need to spend valuable time settings up the foundation of a system that may not be in existence for more than a few hours or days.

If you’re running a production application, the ability to automatically scale if your app encounters an unexpected traffic spike can help you rest at night.

However, if you’re just running an app with a small number of users, you have no need to prototype, and you can easily handle all the maintenance yourself, then PaaS may not be the right answer.

6. Microservices architectures
Gal Oppenheimer, Senior product manager for Built.io

A proper, stable PaaS can be a breath of fresh air. When we launched PaaS as a feature in Built.io Backend in October 2013, it enabled both our internal teams and developers. Any developer could now build a fully automated application — frontend, backend and mobile — on their own.

If you factor in the time it takes to setup, secure and scale a server, you could easily bring a three-month project down to 1.5 months or less. For a project with one web developer and one application developer, you can completely forgo a 50% DevOps engineer.

At Built.io, we’re very big fans of Docker and Node.js. Combined, they offer significant simplifications in your server stack and enable cleaner cross-compatibility of code and content by eliminating data transformations between your APIs and server code.

If you’re doing work that benefits from direct resource access (i.e. processing video or graphics), it’s often important to have fine-tuned control of your infrastructure. However, in the modern, microservices approach to development, we’d recommend separating this feature and either using a third-party service that solves this need or build it from scratch.

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Three cloud PaaS trends to watch in a serverless world https://sdtimes.com/cloud/three-cloud-paas-trends-watch-serverless-world/ https://sdtimes.com/cloud/three-cloud-paas-trends-watch-serverless-world/#comments Thu, 27 Apr 2017 16:00:46 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=24799 The future may be serverless, but for now, commoditized infrastructure is making platform-as-a-service increasingly attractive for startups, enterprises and developer shops. Led by Amazon and Microsoft, vendors such as Salesforce, Google and Oracle are pitching platforms for every development style, architecture, language and use case. And cloud-native programming is even attractive on-premises: a desire for … continue reading

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The future may be serverless, but for now, commoditized infrastructure is making platform-as-a-service increasingly attractive for startups, enterprises and developer shops. Led by Amazon and Microsoft, vendors such as Salesforce, Google and Oracle are pitching platforms for every development style, architecture, language and use case. And cloud-native programming is even attractive on-premises: a desire for consistent processes and DevOps-style tools is driving Microsoft’s Azure Stack, which works seamlessly in hybrid deployments with various Azure platform services. There’s also a thriving community around Cloud Foundry, an open source PaaS that comes in commercial distros by Pivotal, HPE and IBM.

Open source is holistic
Though Amazon Web Services is usually top of mind for infrastructure, it’s slightly less sought-after on the platform side. Here, Microsoft Azure shines, thanks to years of developer tool expertise — and a well-documented ability to pivot toward any market it initially missed.

But before perusing Azure’s plethora of options, it’s worth taking a closer look at how San Francisco-based Pivotal runs its two core open source projects, Cloud Foundry and Spring Boot.

“Pivotal Cloud Foundry goes the whole way from embedded operating systems — so you don’t have to buy anything from Red Hat ever again, to cloud orchestration — so you don’t need Puppet and Chef, to middleware — so you don’t need IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic, to load balancing and some API services, all the way up to cloud-native frameworks such as Spring Boot, which is the most popular Java framework for cloud apps in the world,” according to James Watters, senior vice president of product at Pivotal, in a January 2017 video interview with Datamation.com.

As Watters sees it, Pivotal’s holistic vision is exemplified by its cloud-native apps consultancy, Pivotal Labs. Ford’s connected car service, for example, chose Cloud Foundry running on multiple clouds and partnered with Pivotal Labs to executing their apps.

To be sure, any of the current PaaS vendors, including IBM and HP, building off of Cloud Foundry are adding a plethora of features for orchestration, containers, DevOps, testing and management, not to mention more specialized features such as chat bots, AI, blockchain-as-a-service and functions-as-a-service. But one thing no PaaS user should take for granted is the potential for malicious activity.

Security is critical
“The cloud has made delivering software easier but has opened up a huge attack surface. We use AWS serverlessly to protect AWS,” said Matt Fuller, founder of CloudSploit, which provides open source and hosted automated security and configuration monitoring software for AWS cloud environments.

According to Fuller, “Even the most secure cloud providers only offers security of the cloud. The user is responsible for security in the cloud. As groups, roles, devices, etc. change, oversights and misconfigurations open vulnerabilities that lead to outright hacks or just a financial DDOS [distributed denial of service]. Unfortunately, a single misstep can compromise your entire infrastructure.”

CloudSploit monitors your AWS instance for anomalous activity with tests you choose or create. An open source project available at https://github.com/cloudsploit, security experts from around the world contribute to CloudSploit with the goal of increasing compliance with best practices, to protect the company infrastructure and their client’s information.

Even those who eschew specialized monitoring take confidence in the fact that a core benefit of PaaS is not having to patch the underlying frameworks and operating system. According to Omar Khan, Redmond-based general manager for Microsoft cloud app development and tools, “Developers spend a lot of time, especially in a DevOps world, making sure that the components that their code is running on are updated to avoid any vulnerabilities. PaaS eliminates a lot of that, because the patching is done automatically, and that’s a huge time savings.”

The shift to DevOps culture has also taken effect, Khan explained: “Cloud is enabling DevOps more and more. And we’re seeing developers bringing security into the lifecycle through ‘rugged DevOps’ or ‘shift-left’ of the scanning within the development process — not having to wait to do that stuff once in production.”

Low-code PaaS gains traction
As PaaS gains in popularity, the panoply of flavors increases. In addition to iPaaS (integration PaaS) and PaaS for testing and QA, there are low-code options available. In September 2016, Oracle launched Project Visual Code, a low-code platform for business users and developers to extend services and build new applications with little to no coding.

Low-code platforms are emerging around specific niches, such as UK-based Naqoda’s recently launched Core Banking Platform as well as its existing Tax Engine. The cloud-enabled system enables European open banking via the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2), which enables financial information sharing and APIs for new financial products.

QuickBase is a veteran player in the space and has been collecting metrics on low-code speed gains. Last fall, the company’s “2016 State of Citizen Development” report found that among respondents, a majority said they were able to deliver apps in less than a month. In contrast, for delivering traditional hand-coded apps, two-thirds of developers reported requiring over two months, and nearly one-third required over six.

For some, no-code is a game-changer: “Because all of our applications are produced on a no-code platform as a service, we are able to staff our team with individuals who are less experienced and/or less technical than traditional development shops,” said Treff LaPlante, CEO and founder of CitizenDeveloper.com and WorkXpress in Harrisburg, PA.

“The results have been astounding. We have reduced the average hours to deliver a project from beginning to end to only 273. On this platform we have materially grown our business year over year and are now able to pursue new markets,” he said.

When PaaS isn’t the answer
Of course, PaaS isn’t a panacea. Kim Rowe, CEO and founder of Toronto-based RoweBots Ltd., does custom embedded and Internet of Things development with PaaS, but notes that embedded PaaS is weak in one way or another. Like any good coder, Rowe’s solution was to build his own PaaS. Unison RTOS tackles what he calls the seven key characteristics (lean, adaptable, secure, safe, connected, complete, and cloud) required to build quality embedded systems. Perhaps an eighth key is cost.

“For example, a concussion-detection system we created needs servers running in the cloud. Even if it may not be used for a significant portion of the time, we’re still charged for hosting. Figuring out cloud billing needs to be built into the design. It is one thing if it is a mine collecting data 24/7/365, and another if it is a ball team that uses the sensors two hours per day, four times per week during the school year,” Rowe said.

Adam Stern, founder and CEO of Infinitely Virtual, a cloud service provider, is not a fan of using PaaS to develop for external customers.

PaaS is ideal for companies writing applications that are specific to their business. PaaS makes it possible, even easy, to develop applications rapidly with little technical know-how — applications that aren’t intended to be sold but that run on a single, captive platform,” Stern said. “When it comes to creating an app for customers, however, it’s a different story. If the platform for which the app was written changes or ceases to exist, you’re stuck.”

The danger, as Stern sees it, is too much ease-of-use: “PaaS does tend to put internal development teams on the IT rollercoaster, forever investing and reinvesting in platform-specific application development.”

Finally, all that convenience doesn’t always come cheap, either in terms of  freedom or finances. “We like Amazon Web Services quite a bit, so let’s pick on them. Their DynamoDB (on-demand database) service is great, but after using it for a few months, it becomes quite an undertaking to port it to a different platform,” said Scott Williams, director of software at Tallwave.

“As Fred Brooks says, there are no silver bullets; PaaS systems do tend to be more expensive, and that cost can go up significantly. It’s easy to throw a switch, quadruple your processing capabilities for a spike, and then pass out when the invoice arrives,” Williams said.

Could Serverless be the next Docker?
In 2014, Amazon unveiled its Lambda functions, and since then there’s been a flurry of new serverless offerings.

Along with Iopipe.com and Apex, there’s Serverless Inc., the company behind the actively managed MIT open-source project of the same name. All comprise a new ecosystem of tools to manage, version and test serverless functions, especially Lambda functions. And similar — but by no means identical — compute services are evolving, including Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk, and Google Cloud Functions. Finally, you know it’s a trend when a conference appears: On cue, check out Serverlessconf in Austin this year in April.

What all these serverless function tools have in common is the ability to execute standalone commands in languages such as JavaScript, Python, C#, or Java on cloud infrastructure, with pricing based requests, duration and memory. In his forthcoming book Serverless Architectures on AWS (Manning, in press), Peter Sbarski, VP of engineering at A Cloud Guru, defines five principles of serverless architectures:

  1. “Execute code on demand.”
  2. “Write single-purpose stateless functions.”
    3. “Design push-based, event-driven pipelines.”
    4. “Create thicker, more powerful front ends” and
  3. “Embrace third-party services.”

Indeed, Andreesen-Horowitz parter Peter Levine believes PaaS and the centralized mentality of the cloud will be supplanted by edge devices communicating with each other. That’s not inconceivable, according to Microsoft.

“Moving from a server-based deployment to a container-based deployment really increases agility around being able to update and deliver value faster. When you look at serverless, it continues that trend,” said Omar Khan, Redmond-based General Manager for Microsoft cloud app development and tools.

“Serverless enables you to architect code that is very much a microservices pattern by nature, because each function is its own thing. Serverless enables microservices at a smaller granularity than even containers, as an example.  And when you get more granular microservices, then you think, well, some of these microservices run in the cloud and that’s the right place for that code to execute, but why wouldn’t these microservices run at the edge as well? That’s a trend that is very interesting,” he said.

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Guest View: Why developers are struggling with SaaS https://sdtimes.com/developers/guest-view-developers-struggling-saas/ https://sdtimes.com/developers/guest-view-developers-struggling-saas/#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2016 15:36:50 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=21833 Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is fast becoming the established way of selling software. Companies as big as Google and Microsoft are focusing on the SaaS model due to the many ways in which it opens up new revenue streams. Many of the biggest software IPOs to have in the last few years have been SaaS-related. However, there … continue reading

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Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is fast becoming the established way of selling software. Companies as big as Google and Microsoft are focusing on the SaaS model due to the many ways in which it opens up new revenue streams.

Many of the biggest software IPOs to have in the last few years have been SaaS-related. However, there are many failed examples as well. Many developers are struggling to understand the core essence of the SaaS delivery platform and fail to design robust, scalable and secure architectures for SaaS.

This article is based on the lessons learned from developing our flagship product, Clintra, a cloud-based businessmanagement system. It highlights various aspects you as a SaaS developer must focus on to make your SaaS offering profitable for the long run. It is an exciting (but at the same time challenging) journey.

Why should you take notice?
Worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from nearly US$70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019. According to an IDC report, “Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide.” IDC predicts SaaS will remain the dominant cloud computing type, capturing more than two-thirds of all public cloud spending through most of the forecasted period. Worldwide spending on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will grow at a faster rate than SaaS with five-year CAGRs of 27% and 30.6%, respectively.

Gartner predicts that application software sales will grow by 7.5% this year, and will exceed $200 billion by 2019, driven by widespread adoption of the cloud-based SaaS model.

So are you ready to build your next unicorn company and join the billionaires club? If so, let’s first focus on the important aspects you need to master before you turn your existing software or new idea into SaaS.

Three important factors for building secure, scalable and profitable applications for the cloud
SaaS architecture is different than traditional software architecture. Whether you want to convert your traditional software to SaaS or build it from scratch, you must pay close attention to some of the important factors of the architecture, such as security, performance, scalability and availability.

Security, the all-important beast: Security is the most important factor of SaaS, and every CIO will pay close attention to it. Almost all of our clients asked us if our software is secure and whether or not their data will be safely stored.

With many companies affected by hackers who steal valuable company and customer information, many customers have become more cautious of using SaaS applications. Thus, it is safe to say that if your online service ends up in the news for all the wrong reasons, there is a high probability that there will be a fall in the number of active users of that service—at least immediately.

There are multiple security measures you can take. You need to make sure you have SSL installed on the server, which enables data to be transferred securely. For user authentication and authorization, you can choose from multiple options, like two-factor authentication, IP blocking and MAC address blocking. There are some development practices and design patterns you can use, which will allow to secure your APIs.

Performance and availability, and tips on how to ride this mammoth: Technological innovation has resulted in people taking many features for granted. Users have an ever-increasing set of criteria that must be met in order for them to consider an online service to be exceptional.

This has proven to be a challenge for many vying to provide the highest quality web-based SaaS. If you have used one yourself, you might have found some to be glitchy, slow and downright complicated to use, which users do not enjoy. Thus, if you want to ensure that your online software solution remains the favored option among your users, make sure it performs according to their liking.

In traditional software there will be only one user logged into the system at a time, and the performance of the application depends solely on the user computer’s resources. For SaaS applications, it is different as the processing load is shifted to the server-side, and the user’s computer is acting as a dumb client.

Also, there will be multiple users connecting from different parts of the world at the same time. This puts a heavy load on the server resources, so you want to make sure your server can handle this properly. One way to deal with this is to load balance your services. You can add multiple server nodes, which can connect to a single load balancer. This way you can distribute the load across multiple servers.

There are different designs you can use for load balancing your server, such as round robin, multicast/broadcast, etc. You will also need to focus on failover strategies. For example, you should be prepared to answer the following questions: What will happen if the load balancer fails? Should you load balance your load balancer? What kind of impact will users have if one application node goes down? What will happen if the master database node goes down? What are the points you will include in your disaster recovery plan?

Data backup and recovery, or how to catch the fly: Your disaster recovery plan must focus on data backup and recovery.

This aspect has some legal issues associated with it as well. Depending on your domain area, you may need to make sure you take proper measures to secure your data. For example, if you have a medical SaaS application, then your data backup and recovery plan will look significantly different than an ERP SaaS application. Also, you need to make sure you create multiple recovery strategies. In case one strategy fails, you should have another strategy available.

For data backup, you need to make sure you keep database backups as well as document backups. For database backups, you can set auto-replication on a master database to a read-only slave database server. This will enable you to use this slave server to replace your master database server in case of failure.

For document storage, you need to replicate the stored document from your server to an external storage backup in case you lose your primary storage. One way to do it is use a storage service from AWS, Google Cloud Storage, or some other storage provider. You can setup rsync on the storage folder, which will automatically replicate the documents to this secondary storage.

Three soft factors for making SaaS usable
Once you took care of the above important factors, you must make sure your application is usable. Many SaaS platforms do not do well because they only focus on getting the above three factors right but completely miss out on usability.

There are three soft factors you should look at in order to reap the rewards from your SaaS offering:

Quality of service: Quality is king, especially keeping in mind the number of services that can be used to perform the same task. If a user doesn’t like an online software service, they will graduate to using one provided by your competitor. What I mean by “quality” is concerned with the interface of the service, how stable it is, and how fast it opens, among other factors.

Availability: The mistake that some companies make when they launch a SaaS is that they limit the number of people who can use that service. This is done by only making the service available in specific cities, countries and regions. Even though it is understandable as to why they opt to do this (to test the waters instead of risking it all), it should be noted that this might cause them to lose out on potential business and provide an opportunity for competitors to step in and fill the void.

Ease of use: Online-based software should be easy to use. The main purpose behind providing online software services is to provide convenience to the users. For this reason, online service providers should make sure they stick to a simple format of the software, one that is the same as the one that is offered in the offline version. More often than not, keeping it simple is the best option.

The trade-offs between SaaS performance, security and usability
Sadly, you can’t have everything you wish for with a SaaS feature. You have to look for a balance between performance, security and usability. It is a triangle. The more you stretch on security the less usable the system is. The same is true for performance; the more you focus on performance, the chances are you will create a few security holes in the system. The more you focus on usability, the security and performance get affected.

For example, in order to increase security, you added two-factor authentication. Now the user has to carry an external device with them all the time to make sure they get the valid code for login. This affects usability, and from the performance side the server has to perform additional authentication to validate the entered code.

However, you can also provide options so that your end user can decide whether they want to focus on security or usability. For example, for Clintra, since it is a very generic application that can be used by any industry, we decided to include all the authentication measures, like two-factor authentication, IP blocking, MAC blocking, etc., and allow our clients to choose which type of security they would like to enable.

This allows them to choose between security and usability, so you as a SaaS provider do not have to force your clients one way or the other.

How to choose the best cloud infrastructure for your application
Infrastructure plays an important role in making your SaaS platform profitable, scalable and usable. As such, the world is moving from an owning to a leasing mindset. Leasing offers a lot of benefits as there is no huge upfront cost, and you can start off with a small investment.

You should design your SaaS architecture in a way that it allows you to use a PaaS and IaaS in combination. The PaaS model makes the coding and programming of web-based software easy by providing developers with the tools to make the service better in a number of aspects. There are many great PaaS services available that offer low-level services like media server, Auth Server, preconfigured application servers, etc., such as Salesforce.com.

These services will save you considerable expense because you don’t need an upfront investment to hire someone to set up your servers for you and then pay them yearly to manage them.

PaaS comes with support so you can get peace of mind and save money. The same is true with IaaS, which provides the combination of software and hardware that is used to provide the service. It focuses on the operational aspect and proper functioning of the web-based services. In simpler terms, it is a combination of servers, networks, storage and operating systems that is used to effectively deliver the service.

You should focus on using a mix of PaaS and IaaS platforms. This will enable you to do rapid development and improve time to market for your SaaS-based applications.

Why are developers struggling?
SaaS is growing, and many new companies are reaping the profits from the huge market for SaaS-based products. However, older developers and companies are feeling left behind.

Whenever there is a paradigm shift, there is an opportunity for new ideas to overtake old, established ideas. This is exactly what is happening with SaaS. It totally changes the rules of the game, and while older companies struggle to change and adapt, newer companies made for the future are leapfrogging over them.

A new revenue model
Revenue models for software companies were simple. You usually sold your product in an annual license and added in a monthly payment for support in some cases.

SaaS introduces a new revenue model, which is different. Instead of buying your product, people buy a subscription to use your services.

SaaS often ties customers into contracts for a certain period of time, say 12 months. This makes your revenue forecast much more predictable, which investors like to see.

Software vendors no longer collect large sums upfront, but fees are spread out over time. This allows them to scale the offering to serve many more customers at the same time, and also to deliver the product more rapidly to their customers all over the world.

Customers also get a lot of customization options, which further complicate financial projections and models.

Companies have to figure out how to generate revenue in a way that is completely different from anything they have done before. It is hard enough to rebrand a company—it is much harder to rethink the company’s business model.

The need to rebuild the software
Most established companies have enough people to update their software and make new versions of it. In order to adapt traditional software applications to SaaS, however, companies have to completely rewrite their software from scratch in many cases. New companies can simply invest all their development resources in creating new software in a SaaS model. Older companies that are dependent on legacy software need to support their existing software while creating a separate SaaS product as well.

Companies also have to completely rethink how their software works in order to turn it into a SaaS product. There are software products that have been on the market for two decades, and they were always built with the assumption that they will be installed on computers. But that isn’t true anymore.

The SaaS platform has become increasingly popular for many reasons. Generally, customers find the subscription-based solution more flexible in terms of their needs. It also makes their products and services more affordable for them in the long term. By making the switch to the SaaS paradigm, developers can capture a large segment of the target market, and earn greater revenues.

Here are the some of the things that can help make the transition to a SaaS platform successful and profitable for a developer:

  • Deliver unique and outstanding products and services that not only satisfy, but delight customers.
  • Keep the product offering simple. Complex features seem intimidating to new customers, causing them to look elsewhere.
  • Dedicate resources such as sales, services, and customer support for your SaaS offerings.
  • Make sure to market to the growing mobile customer segment.
  • Constantly test and update your product delivered on a SaaS platform.

In the end, the effort to adopt the SaaS paradigm will be well worth it. You will be able to generate loyal customers, boost revenues, and position your business to achieve profitable growth targets.

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20 ways to build up your Azure deployment https://sdtimes.com/azure/20-ways-to-build-up-your-azure-deployment/ https://sdtimes.com/azure/20-ways-to-build-up-your-azure-deployment/#comments Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:00:38 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=16424 Despite playing catch-up to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure has quickly become a contender with its powerful Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. With constant innovations around usability, open source and cross-platform compatibility, infrastructure management and evolving software development paradigms for new devices and applications, it can be hard to get your bearings within the vast platform. … continue reading

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Despite playing catch-up to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure has quickly become a contender with its powerful Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings. With constant innovations around usability, open source and cross-platform compatibility, infrastructure management and evolving software development paradigms for new devices and applications, it can be hard to get your bearings within the vast platform.

First things first: What comprises the Azure platform? It’s not turtles all the way down; in Azure principal program manager Scott Hanselman’s words, the underlying layer, the “infinite hard disk in the sky,” is Azure storage, where you can drill down to every virtual hard disk (VHD) image in your deployment. The next level up comprises virtual machines, which you choose, configure and manage.

On top of those VMs is a middle ground between IaaS and PaaS: Worker Roles, which are stateless cloud apps that can scale their VMs up or down. Above Worker Roles we are clearly in PaaS territory, with Web Apps, Azure Batch and HDInsight (Hadoop) for Big Data analysis. And at the top there are Web Jobs, Mobile Apps, and Media Services. These pieces are among those also available as the Azure Stack for on-premise datacenters or hybrid cloud applications.

(Related: PaaS gets a new lease on life)

“The first distinction to make as an Azure customer is, do I want to consume VMs, or do I want to consume the platform that Azure provides me?” said Esteban Garcia, Visual Studio ALM MVP and chief technologist for Nebbia Technology, and Azure company in Orlando. “Within PaaS, we typically do a Web app and SQL services. Those are pretty straightforward and easy to discover.”

It’s likely that most cloud problems you’re facing have already been solved somewhere in the Azure community, advises Corey Sanders, director of program management for Azure. “Make sure you look at the full breadth of services we offer, because they solve a lot of different problems. That’s the value of having a broad platform such as Azure,” he said.

Read on for tips from these Azure experts.

1. Saving pennies, saving dollars
The promise of the cloud is elasticity: sizing your deployment according to demand. Too often, Azure users are surprised by the multiple dimensions of pricing, from storage to transactions, support, bandwidth and more. The first step toward transparency in billing is not to “set it and forget it” but to monitor, measure and adjust frequently.

“One aspect of VMs that is not well known but that I think is super cool is the wide variety of VM sizes that we now offer,” said Sanders. “And the fact that when we stop a VM through the portal, we actually stop billing for it. The combo of those two has resulted in very few points of contention around billing.”

The Azure Billing Alert Service can create customized billing alerts for your Azure accounts, and the pricing calculator is your friend.

2. Elastic Scale for Azure SQL Database
Performance and price limits on Azure SQL Database, which offer a subset of SQL Server features, can slow you down while also burning cash.

“People use SQL Service instead of the full server,” said Garcia. “Whenever you do that, you pay for Database Throughput Units. You could be paying for 10 databases with five DTUs [database throughput units], which is a small number of DTUs to use. What you can do is start using this elastic scale, say ‘I’m going to assign 100 DTUs to 10 databases,’ and they are going to share that processing power among all the databases.” In other words, a P3 tier database costs US$4.65 per DTU per month, while the same number of DTUs scaled out rather than up on an S2 instance cost $1.50 a month.

“They are all able to use that shared pool of resources rather than being constrained,” said Garcia. “It gets along with the idea that cloud allows you to draw resources from anywhere as needed.”

Currently in preview, Elastic Scale simplifies the scaling of data tiers from just a few to thousands of database shards via .NET client libraries and Azure service templates. High-volume OLTP, multi-tenant SaaS, and continuous data collection from telemetry and Internet of Things applications are likely use cases.

3. Preview pricing
The aforementioned Elastic Scale is just one example of many new features available at preview pricing, which may be free or 50% less than the general availability pricing. Taking advantage of preview pricing lets you play with new features, stay ahead of the technical curve, save money, and possibly beat the competition by having production-ready deployments when the features go live for all customers. A list of preview services for Azure is available here.

4. The Azure Portal
Also in preview is the Azure Portal, a new dashboard for accessing IaaS and PaaS deployments.

“I was not happy with the portal at first, but now it’s growing on me,” said Hanselman in his June 2015 TechDays UK keynote. “If you double-click on the background, you can change the theme to dark. This made me so happy.”

Right-clicking on a given window pins it to the start board. Charts can be edited to show, say, CPU percentage, pricing, disk usage and more. “Don’t discount the portal quite yet; it’s fantastic,” said Hanselman.

5. Keyboard shortcuts
Every computer user knows the mouse can be deadly, in terms of ergonomics and efficiency. The best economy of movement is achieved with keyboard shortcuts. Launched with version 5.0 of the Azure Portal, the shortcut menu can be accessed by hitting shift + ?. Luckily, there aren’t too many to memorize. You’ll want to use these and more:

Hubs (left menu) shortcuts:
H – show startboard
N – open Notifications hub
A – open Active Journeys hub (a Journey is the current opened group of blades; a blade is card/tab/subpage that contains some group of tiles, e.g. website properties or analytics)
/ – open Browse/Search hub
B – open Billing hub
C – open Create/New hub

Changing focus between blades shortcuts:
J – move focus to the previous blade
K – move focus to the next blade
F – move focus to the first blade
L – move focus to the last blade

6. Azure resource manager
The complexity of managing websites, virtual machines and databases just got a little simpler with the addition of the resource manager in the new Azure Portal. Group and view resources (such as an instance of Application Insights along with a Web application and SQL database) as a single resource group. Deployment templates in Visual Studio are also aided by IntelliSense that surfaces new resource providers and template language functions to you as you write deployment templates, avoiding pesky naming errors.

“Azure resource manager has an exciting, growing community,” said Sanders. “We’re seeing in templates for the resource manager—starting about six months ago—a pretty exciting pickup in the community. We seeded GitHub with a set of these templates and put them all out fully open source. Now we have over 140 contributors and more than 200 templates available. It’s a delightful outcome to see this service that we didn’t do a huge amount of coverage on get this kind of response.
7. Scale Sets
Do you have Big Data or container-based workloads? You may want to orchestrate these complex, large-scale deployments with Scale Sets. Also in public preview, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets let you manage and configure virtual machines as a set of identical Windows or Linux images.

“A customer can come in and say, ‘I want VM Scale Sets in groups of 10, and I want to configure them all with a tool like Chef or Puppet,’ ” said Sanders. “The other aspect with Scale Sets that’s exciting is the deep integration with Azure Insights autoscale, which restricts cost and spending by only using the compute resources you need, responding to traffic changes.”

8. Security
A Denial of Service attack can hurt your wallet, hamstring your business and harm your customers. Like other cloud providers, Microsoft aims to share its security knowledge as well as build in basic protections. Azure Security Center’s view lets you set policies across all your subscriptions and monitor security configurations. The good news is, the days of accidentally raising DDOS flags by testing or polling your own app are over, thanks to cutting-edge threat intelligence around malformed requests and traffic sources.

9. Site extensions
Another powerful way to add custom administration features to your Web apps is with site extensions. Write them yourself or choose from the new Site Extensions Galler These live on the SCM (site control manager) site for administration and debugging that runs over SSL and is created with every Azure website. The URL for your SCM site is the hostname plus “scm”. Thus, “sdtimes.azurewebsites.net” would have a corresponding SCM site at “sdtimes.scm.azurewebsites.net”.

10. PowerShell cmdlets
Whether you want to clean up a deployment where you have some extra VHDs and VMs lying around, provision VMs, set up cross-premises networks, or other production tasks, you’ll enjoy the Unix-like scripting power of PowerShell and the new PowerShell cmdlets. As of the November 2015 update of the Azure SDK 2.8 for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015, the PowerShell script for deploying Azure Resource Manager templates now works with PowerShell cmdlets. Find scripting solutions already crafted for you in the PowerShell Gallery.

11. Service fabric
Riding the microservices revolution, Service Fabric is Azure’s platform for assembling cloud applications from a large collection of services. “Service fabric offers a platform that runs on Azure but also on-premises,” said Sanders. “This is a platform for deploying, managing and maintaining microservices. Discovery is handled for you, and it supports stateful and stateless microservices.”

12. Docker
The explosion of ways you can tinker with cloud resources, from remote desktops and SSH to portal shortcuts, has only just begun. According to Hanselman, the microservices revolution means there will soon be even more options to choose from.

“Simply stated, if I’ve got a tiny little 10MB PHP app sitting inside of a 5GB VHD, that’s a lot of VHD, a lot of virtual machine for a small Web application,” he said. “Does it really need that weight? That much security and isolation? It just needs to be in a container, and it needs to be deployable in a reliable way. Docker will provide that.”

“The excitement around Docker is very real. It makes it incredibly easy to deploy in ways that have never been possible,” said Sanders, who notes new integration of Docker support into Visual Studio and the Azure marketplace.

“My biggest tip and trick with Docker containers is just to deploy one. If you’ve never done anything with Docker, there’s a way to quickly deploy with a fully packaged VM and Docker in the Azure marketplace. No bringing down of the Docker engine, no pulling down the hub.”

13. Azure DevTest Labs
How do you avoid using up all your MSDN credit while testing on Azure? The preview of Azure DevTest Labs lets you spin up Windows and Linux environments to deploy and test applications while avoiding cost overruns.

“With Azure Dev/Test labs, the idea is that a lot of times developers have to wait for someone to spin up labs for them,” said Nebbia’s Garcia. “This allows you to spin up environments much quicker. You can choose for it to run a maximum eight hours, and after that it gets shut down. It’s a quick way to provision environments but avoid the problem of leaving it up and running. You can push a button and have whole sandbox.”

14. Application Insights
“Application Insights allows you to dig down and find the root cause of any application issues and understand how people are using the application,” said Garcia. “I’ve been using it for a year and half…as a Microsoft MVP.” For example, he uses it for availability testing from different geographic locations, either as a static test that checks a single page, or as a test of dynamic application flow.

15. Kudu, CloudBerry and Sendy
The Kudu open-source project is a useful troubleshooting tool and client-side process explorer for capturing memory dumps or looking at deployment. It’s also a site extension and welcomes community participation.

Another useful freeware tool is CloudBerry Explorer for Azure Blob Storage, which offers a file manager-style user interface to Azure Blob Storage.

If you’re already mucking around in the cloud, you may have e-mail update needs that can be met by Sendy or similar tools. Sendy was designed to work with Amazon Simple Email Service, but can be adapted for Azure as well. The cost savings versus a hosted e-mail solution such as MailChimp can be enormous.

16. Remote debugging
In its September 2015 white paper, “Practical Guide to Platform-as-a-Service Version 1.0,” the Cloud Standards Customer Council notes that no PaaS worth its salt should be without remote debug capabilities. “Application developers should have access to tools that enable them to control activities in the PaaS—for example, uploading (‘pushing’) application code, binding services to applications, controlling application configuration, starting and stopping application instances,” it said.

“Such capabilities should be provided in a way that fits well with the other tools used by the developer—command-line tools, graphical tools, embedded components for development environments. Ideally these tools should work via an API that is exposed by the PaaS system—cloud service customers should look for these APIs and assure themselves that the API can be used by a variety of custom tooling code.”

Remote debugging with Visual Studio fits the bill: Developers interact with cloud applications as if they were on-premise. Best used with Visual Studio 2013, remote debugging lets you manipulate memory, set breakpoints, and step through code—with the caveat that breaking a running process could break your live website. Save this one for pre-production sites.

17. Performance testing
Another public preview that is currently free to use, performance testing, allows you to generate thousands of virtual users from around the world and test your application against the load.

“We started using performance testing in the past six months,” said Garcia. “If you spin up a Web application, you’re able to do a performance test right from Azure, right in the cloud. Before, it was more on the Visual Studio side. So I can see what it looks like if 1,000 people hit my app at once. It’s very useful in knowing how to scale the application: We can have fewer servers, but make them stronger by adding this performance testing feature right within the Azure portal when you first launch an application.”

18. Easy ROI: Lift and shift
Want an instant return on your cloud investment? Eliminate idle servers that only handle periodic loads. “This is something people forget about when they’re thinking about the cloud,” said Hanselman. “Azure storage, that’s an infinite disk that’s out there. You probably have a machine sitting under your desk and it’s got a VM, running maybe an expense reporting system. It’s something that you need to lift and shift into the cloud. There are migration tools that can help you. Literally, it’s Hyper-V in the cloud, but that’s only the most basic way of using Azure. So, Step 0: Lift and shift. Then start thinking about other ways to exploit stuff.”

19. Developer services marketplace
Before you reinvent speech recognition, check the Developer Services Marketplace for free and paid ways to extend functionality, turbo-charge development, and manage cloud deployments with certified Azure tools such as io for event-driven computing, or face APIs from Project Oxford.

20. Ride the IoT wave
No set of tips would be complete without instructions on how to program the proverbial light bulb. These days, Internet of Things projects are everywhere. Hanselman, a type 1 diabetic, movingly demonstrated in a November 2015 keynote video how he tracks his blood sugar and insulin pump in the cloud with Azure technologies.

Microsoft Azure IoT Hub offers SDKs, management and security solutions to harness a plethora of IoT devices, and once the data is collected, there are new machine-learning tools available to process data stored in HD Insight, Microsoft’s version of the Hadoop Big Data store. Have fun!

Start your engines
Use these 20 tips as a checklist for leveraging the vast Azure platform. The more you understand Azure, the more you see where it’s headed: “We’re seeing a blurring of IaaS vs. PaaS and starting to just see a compute platform,” said Sanders.

Redmond has clearly learned to embrace today’s polyglot cloud, and you can use that flexibility to your advantage. “Azure is not only a Windows server; they have Ubuntu, they have Linux servers, they have a new agreement with Red Hat, you can spin up an Oracle database… There’s so many different non-Microsoft technologies to choose from,” said Garcia.

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PaaS gets a new lease on life https://sdtimes.com/containers/paas-gets-a-new-lease-on-life/ https://sdtimes.com/containers/paas-gets-a-new-lease-on-life/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2015 14:01:07 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=15971 Derek Collison’s first cloud platform might have sterling credentials, but he now calls it a tarnished effort. “I see the writing on the wall. A couple years ago, I started saying PaaS is dead. I’m arguing that Cloud Foundry has not been able to keep up. At KubeCon [Google’s conference for the Kubernetes container orchestration … continue reading

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Derek Collison’s first cloud platform might have sterling credentials, but he now calls it a tarnished effort.

“I see the writing on the wall. A couple years ago, I started saying PaaS is dead. I’m arguing that Cloud Foundry has not been able to keep up. At KubeCon [Google’s conference for the Kubernetes container orchestration tool], IBM was not on a panel. Docker’s been a thing now for a year, and they’re just announcing support. Developers went through the PaaS revolution; now they’re saying, ‘We want our opinion back,’ ” he said.

Opinions about operating systems, language versions and the like are more important to developers now, he believes, given the DevOps point solutions available and the tremendous compute power at their fingertips.

It might be hyperbole, but then Collison does pack a credible punch as the man behind the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS, which now underpins IBM Bluemix, HP Helion and Pivotal Web Services. As CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Apcera, itself a cloud application platform (though, he argues, not a PaaS), he’s not alone in seeing the rise of containers as a direct hit to the promise of PaaS. And he doesn’t buy the argument that, conceptually, PaaS was simply a method of container orchestration.

“I wrote most of the original stuff,” Collison said. “We didn’t use containers [until Warden Linux container management was built]. The point was, that was a means to an end. ‘Hey developer, give me access, give me the right to some of the opinion about VM, memory, networking, and for that I will trade you a massive speedup.’ ”

Will the ‪rapid deployment of modern applications be dominated by the elegant orchestration of containers on cloud resources? Or will microservices breathe new life into PaaS?

“Everybody needs a PaaS; everyone needs an automated infrastructure for deploying your application,” said Chris Richardson, who wrote a Java PaaS for Amazon EC2 that was acquired by SpringSource in May 2009. “Where the question mark is is whether people are going to be widely adopting any of the PaaS products, or what tech will people be adopting; will it be PaaS or Docker clustering?”

But there’s much more to consider, in light of the Amazon Re:Invent conference in October. Could Internet of Things applications spur order-of-magnitude complexities (scale, security, streaming data and storage) that launch a new PaaS boom? Will “serverless” apps, practically sentient, navigate a programmable Web on their own terms?

But first, a simpler question: What is a PaaS?

The trouble with definitions
While both Infrastructure- and Software-as-a-Service seem relatively easy to define (one offers compute resources, the other offers standalone apps, both via the cloud), PaaS, by its nature, sits between these two extremes. Does a cloud-based IDE, or any form of cloud-based coding, fit into the PaaS picture? Not according to Richardson, who says that a cloud IDE like Xamarin (for cross-platform mobile development) or Orion (a version of the Eclipse IDE) are definitely not a PaaS. But a tool that deploys and manages your uploaded code is.

Not everyone agrees.

“Honestly, I struggle with the exact definition of all these terms,” said Paulo Rosado, Lisbon-based CEO and founder of OutSystems, which makes a PaaS optimized for visual rapid application development. “The typical Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers, when they incrementally add higher level services—I ask, are they now PaaS?”

Conversely, when he looks at similar offerings that are code-focused, he sees them adding platform services.

“Appcelerator has Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service,” said Rosado. “Xamarin is adding that same capability and moving out of the IDE-only tool space, because it makes sense. It’s needed for the mobile tool. You need to cover the full application life cycle. If you miss one piece, your promise of fast change isn’t there.”

Serverless doesn’t mean serverless
Adding to the confusion are Amazon’s “serverless architectures,” which it calls a motivation for its Lambda tool. Lambda, which has a predecessor in IronWorker by Iron.io, automatically runs tasks in response to modifications to objects in Amazon S3 buckets, messages in Kinesis streams, or updates in DynamoDB, among other events.

In a white paper from October 2015 titled “AWS Well-Architected Framework,” Amazon advises: “Use server-less architectures: In the cloud, server-less architectures remove the need for you to run and maintain servers to carry out traditional compute activities. For example, storage services can act as static websites, removing the need for Web servers; and event services can host your code for you. This not only removes the operational burden of managing these servers, but also can lower transactional costs because these managed services operate at cloud scale.”

Does this serverless approach actually leapfrog containers and PaaS? Probably not, since “serverless” translates to “Don’t worry about servers, let us do that for you.” So capacity, scaling, fault tolerance, updates, logging and the like are AWS’ concerns, while you enjoy event-driven scale at sub-second performance—and sub-second metering.

“I’m super excited about AWS Lambda,” said Richardson. “That’s the ultimate PaaS, albeit in constrained ways. You give it your mini node.js app, say ‘Connect to a Kinesis stream or S3 bucket or other input stream,’ and say ‘Invoke this every five minutes,’ and you don’t have to worry about deployment at all. With the API gateway, I can say, ‘When a request comes in from this URL, invoke this Lambda.’ It’s quite flexible.

“I’ve just started using it. For this platform that I’m building [that] has an API, I have a Lambda. After three consecutive failures, I get an e-mail saying I have a problem, so it’s trivial transaction monitoring and I don’t have to set up a service or run a Docker container.”

It’s not the only game in town, however: The aforementioned IronWorker, launched four years ago, can run tasks in all major programming languages on any cloud (even private). But Amazon may win once again on cost, since with [AWS] Lambda, you pay only for the compute time you consume.”

Azure and AWS
Amazon managed to swoop in and control the cloud business before anyone else had a chance, but Microsoft has done a bang-up job of gaining traction with Azure. But is Azure more popular as a PaaS or as IaaS?

There aren’t definitive numbers on how popular the higher-level elements of the stack are, but it’s not a stretch to imagine that Redmond would succeed at building a developer tool set. Perhaps more impressive is that it has quickly bulked up its deployment muscle to become the second-place IaaS provider. It continues to add elements to its PaaS, however, such as Cloud Foundry, an IoT suite, the Azure Service Fabric, Azure Security Center, and, of course, Docker.

Like every other PaaS out there, Azure has worked to incorporate Docker natively in response to developer demands. At its September 2015 virtual conference, AzureCon, Redmond announced a prototype Azure Container Service, which continues the company’s work with Docker for container creation and Mesosphere for orchestration.

The Azure Container Service Resource Provider for Azure Resource Manager lets you create and manage clusters of hosts preconfigured with Docker, Apache Mesos, Marathon, and Docker Swarm. “This open approach to container application management means you can choose the technologies you prefer and layer them on top of the Azure Container Service,” wrote Ross Gardler, program manager for Microsoft Azure, on the Azure blog. “Furthermore, by supporting community-defined APIs at every level of the service, we ensure that you can maintain portability of your code from developer workstations, to on-premises private clouds, and to Azure.”

Managing a cluster of containers is no easy task, however. According to Gardler, “At present this configuration requires thousands of lines of code, not to mention a deep understanding of the technologies involved. Our Resource Provider will abstract away much of this complexity. Those thousands of lines will be reduced to tens of lines for default configurations. This simplification means fewer configuration errors when deploying and managing these complex clusters.”

Collison: What I learned from writing Cloud Foundry
When he looks at Cloud Foundry, Derek Collison sees four points that could underlie the future of application deployment. “I can say ‘This is what I did right with [Cloud Foundry] and this is what I missed.’ What I missed first was trust issues: having a platform that we can trust,” he said.

Trust, he explained, means defining what is allowed to run inside a workload and by whom, checking for Zero Day exploits and the like.

“Second, you need to orchestrate diverse workloads, not just greenfield apps,” said Collison. “What can a workload consume, that’s largely a solved problem. Pick your flavor of tech: VM [or] container.

“Third, where can the workload run? It’s less about the underlying technology that drives it—Marathon or Mesos or Kubernetes. It’s about, is it technology-aware?

“Fourth, what kind of workload access do you have to a truly programmable network? All of this ecosystem turnover, it’s not about containers. They will eventually get to this: Those four things have to be what makes up the solution. No matter what everyone says, that’s where we’re going to end up.”

Cloud Foundry enjoys Netflix innovations
Collison’s claim notwithstanding, Cloud Foundry does appear to have a healthy level of growth in services. One that was recently announced is based on the popular Spring Cloud OSS, used by Netflix for video streaming. According to a Pivotal announcement, “Spring Cloud Services for Pivotal Cloud Foundry goes one step further to provide opinionated provisioning and life-cycle management to these components.”

And Cloud Foundry continues to spread the OSS joy to include popular IaaS vendors. In November 2015, Microsoft upgraded its preview of Cloud Foundry on Azure to general availability. Customers can run either the open-source Cloud Foundry or the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with features like:

  • Provisioning resources required for BOSH and Cloud Foundry via Azure Resource Manager template
  • Using Azure CPI to provision and manage VMs for Cloud Foundry
  • Using all standard Cloud Foundry features such as availability sets and persistent disk snapshots
  • Integrating service brokers

“The [General Availability] of Cloud Foundry on Azure is a major milestone for both the open-source community and our enterprise customers,” said James Watters, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Group, Pivotal. “The demand for Azure was so high that we already have Fortune 100 customers building their next-generation applications with Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure.”

PaaS is dead. Long live PaaS
The semantic arguments around PaaS and containers could ultimately cost some companies money if they misunderstand the differences, according to Simon Wardley, a researcher for Leading Edge Forum and a frequent keynoter at OSCON, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. “PaaS has a bright future when we’re talking about Heroku, [Google App Engine], Azure, Cloud Foundry and equivalent systems,” he blogged, going on to praise “underlying components” such as Docker.

But the argument that containers change everything goes back to Collison’s claim that containers weren’t in the original Cloud Foundry, and weren’t the point of the framework at all. Containers did make it into Cloud Foundry and other PaaSes, but it wasn’t until Docker that anyone cared. The current excitement, Wardley posits, shouldn’t color the historical facts.

“Unfortunately there’s a lot of stuff out there trying to pass itself off as PaaS and a lot of misunderstanding on componentization,” wrote Wardley. “While components like Docker are extremely useful (and deserve to spread), there are those trying to portray it as a key defining characteristic of a PaaS. Forget it; Docker will become a highly useful but also invisible component of PaaS, and the success of PaaS will depend upon the limitation of choice and certainly not the exposure of underlying systems like Docker to end users.”

Further, the tricky business of orchestrating containers may be a little too ops-oriented for the same developers who are enthusing about containers. Marathon, Mesos, Diego and Kubernetes are, by nature, meant to do much more complex work than Docker. But the business value of what Pivotal Cloud Foundry calls “opinionated provisioning and life-cycle management” will be enormous if it helps build a microservices-based application, which is not synonymous with a container-based application.

According to Richardson, “These days, microservices and containers are very much intertwined, which is unfortunate. Microservices are an application architecture issue. Is it a monolith or is it a set of collaborating services? Then the question you have to answer is how do I deploy it? Containers are just one of the possible deployment options.”

Head: AWS Lambda gets developers excited
The Lambda functions that Amazon launched in 2014 were rapidly expanded in 2015, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced in his keynote at the company’s October 2015 Re:Invent conference.

“Remember, no server is easier to manage than no server, yeah? So it makes it simple for you to build applications for which before this you had to run sometimes a whole fleet of EC2 instances,” he said.

One customer case study Vogels mentioned was AdRoll, which “needed to run a whole fleet of EC2 instances to continuously monitor their S3 bucket, and then take that data and push it out to six different regions around the world. Now, with Lambda, they can actually remove that whole EC2 fleet, and just have simple functions that have been triggered by the arrival of that simple data.”

In summary, said Vogels: “We see a whole set of innovative applications being built because now you no longer have to worry about where to run them. We will do that for you.”

New features in Lambda include:

  • SES inbound rules
  • CloudWatch Log processing
  • Python 2.7 support
  • Longer-running functions up to five minutes
  • Resource sizing
  • Scheduled functions
  • Functions versioning
  • IoT back ends
  • VPC support

Amazon’s stealth cloud market grab
Few people saw it coming—and when they did, it was already too late. Microservices consultant Chris Richardson recalls his first encounter with AWS.

“I remember a presentation at our East Bay Java user group,” he said. “This was in 2006. I first heard about EC2 when we had a guy from Amazon come. We thought he was going to talk about selling books, but instead he talked about provisioning 20 servers for 10 cents an hour. At this time, servers were precious resources—none of my clients ever had enough hardware. I ended up getting an AWS account and writing a Java PaaS for it. That was what became Cloud Foundry [his version, which ended up being the name for the completely different PaaS written by Derek Collison, when both Richardson’s and Collison’s companies were ultimately acquired by VMware].”

Richardson expresses admiration for how thoroughly Amazon went on to not only dominate the cloud market but also have lasting influence on DevOps practices.

Today, Amazon Web Services’ cloud IaaS market share is some 28%, according to estimates by Synergy. That’s compared to Microsoft at 10%, IBM at 7%, Google at 5%, Salesforce at 4%, and Rackspace at 3%.

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Infographic: Back-end services explained https://sdtimes.com/appcelerator/infographic-back-end-services-explained/ Mon, 12 Oct 2015 15:14:24 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=15211 The Web is ever changing, and with it so are the back-end technologies used to power Web applications. With the rise of mobile enterprise application platforms, mobile back ends as services and now microservices, it can be confusing what these terms mean and how they should be used. Appcelerator has created a “family tree” infographic … continue reading

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The Web is ever changing, and with it so are the back-end technologies used to power Web applications. With the rise of mobile enterprise application platforms, mobile back ends as services and now microservices, it can be confusing what these terms mean and how they should be used. Appcelerator has created a “family tree” infographic to trace where these technologies came from, how they evolved, how they relate, and how far the Web has come.

1012.sdt-infographic

“The need to innovate faster and faster is driving an evolution in how we connect and communicate across different systems,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “We are arriving at a place where developers can stop fussing over the confusing bits and pieces of back-end plumbing and focus instead on the endpoint and, most importantly, the user experience.

“In our eyes, ‘microservices’ is our best shot at encapsulating where mobile architectures should be—and for many organizations, [it] already is. Promising faster delivery and more maintainable, scalable systems, microservices marks a big milestone for app development, and with this infographic, we trace the evolution to show just how far we’ve come.”

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PaaSLane shifts emphasis from cloud migration to app modernization https://sdtimes.com/application-modernization/paaslane-shifts-emphasis-cloud-migration-app-modernization/ Tue, 16 Sep 2014 13:00:09 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=8107 Cloud Technology Partners is shifting its emphasis from migrating applications to the cloud to making them cloud-ready through modernization, culminating in today’s release of version 2.5 of its PaaSLane application platform. “Companies are moving the simplest, least important apps [to the cloud] to see how they can make the cloud work for them,” said Ben … continue reading

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Cloud Technology Partners is shifting its emphasis from migrating applications to the cloud to making them cloud-ready through modernization, culminating in today’s release of version 2.5 of its PaaSLane application platform.

“Companies are moving the simplest, least important apps [to the cloud] to see how they can make the cloud work for them,” said Ben Grubin, director of product management and marketing at Cloud Technology Partners. “Those applications are the test bed. No organizations are moving their mission-critical apps to the cloud, but they want to make them cloud-ready to avoid having to do another modernization effort in five years. We found a well of need of people picking applications that are a little old and a little crusty and wanting to modernize them.”

(Related: Making apps ready for the cloud)

The costs of maintaining applications is crowding out the ability of development to transform business and innovate, Grubin said, citing a 2013 report by the analysis firm Gartner that shows application development as an increasing share of total IT budgets, with much of that spent on maintaining apps, not developing new ones.

Traditionally, modernization had been thought of as a way to lower the costs of development and ownership, and to increase agility. Today, Grubin said, it’s about reducing complexity, and gaining elasticity and flexibility while lowering capital expenses.

To address this need to modernize older applications, two pieces of PaaSLane have been broken out: PaaSLane Assess and PaaSLane Optimize. Assess analyzes source code using a rich set of rules to detect potential issues around scalability, security, design patterns, performance and maintenance; identifies modernization opportunities; offers code remediation; and identifies applications that already are cloud-ready.

Optimize, when integrated into the development life cycle, optimizes applications for specific cloud platforms; modernizes applications; and can be used to create optimized cloud applications from square one, Grubin explained.

The tools, he said, “look at high-level architectural best practices that are portable across platforms.” PaaSLane 2.5 supports Apprenda, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google Compute, OpenStack and Windows Azure.

Among the new features in version 2.5 are local profiling for organizations that won’t upload proprietary code the cloud; enhanced .NET profiling, with more than 50 new rules for C# and .NET applications; a complete set of rules for optimizing applications for Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine; and rule- and report-management improvements.

Grubin said the company is adding new rules at the rate of one per day, reflecting updates to outside cloud platforms within the PaaSLane platform.

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The most popular open-source cloud projects of 2014 https://sdtimes.com/ansible/popular-open-source-cloud-projects-2014/ https://sdtimes.com/ansible/popular-open-source-cloud-projects-2014/#comments Fri, 22 Aug 2014 20:37:34 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=7779 When it comes to open-source cloud projects, OpenStack is on top, according to a survey conducted by the Linux Foundation and analysis organization The New Stack. While the open-source software for building private and public clouds is only 4 years old, the results aren’t too surprising. The project has received support from leading industry giants … continue reading

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When it comes to open-source cloud projects, OpenStack is on top, according to a survey conducted by the Linux Foundation and analysis organization The New Stack. While the open-source software for building private and public clouds is only 4 years old, the results aren’t too surprising. The project has received support from leading industry giants such as HP, IBM, Red Hat and VMware.

What’s more surprising is that Docker, which is just over a year old, followed OpenStack, taking second place for best overall open-source cloud project.

(Related: OpenStack is becoming more cohesive)

“OpenStack had the most contributors weighing in on the survey and has been growing quickly,” wrote Alex Williams, founder of the New Stack, on Linux.com. “Fewer respondents said they contribute to Docker, but it’s the project everyone said they want to contribute to more.”

Following OpenStack and Docker in the best overall category were KVM, CloudStack and Ceph.

Respondents were also asked to choose the best project in five different categories: Hypervisor/Container, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Configuration and Management Tools, and Storage.

In the Hypervisor and Container project category, KVM, Docker, Xen Project and CoreOS led the group. OpenShift and Cloud Foundry dominated the PaaS category; and OpenStack continued to led the projects in the IaaS category, with CloudStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus following.

Puppet, Ansible, Salt, Juju and Chef were among the top projects in provisioning and management tools. And Ceph, Gluster and Swift led the storage projects.

“OpenStack and Docker will continue to dominate the open-source cloud discussion,” according to Williams. “But Docker may prove to gain the most as it is also breeding a diverse ecosystem of open-source projects. OpenStack is primarily contained (no pun intended) to the development of its own cloud operating system.”

The survey gathered information from more than 550 respondents over a two-week period in July, and the results were announced at CloudOpen North America, a Linux Foundation trade show earlier this week.

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Kony combines MADP, MBaaS and PaaS into one platform https://sdtimes.com/kony/kony-combines-madp-mbaas-paas-one-platform/ Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:58:09 +0000 https://sdtimes.com/?p=7704 Kony wants to speed up mobile app development with the latest release of MobileFabric, its app development solution that combines a mobile application development platform (MADP), Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS), API management and Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure. “Today our customers have to make difficult choices on which different technology platform to pick that supports their requirements,” said Burley … continue reading

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Kony wants to speed up mobile app development with the latest release of MobileFabric, its app development solution that combines a mobile application development platform (MADP), Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaaS), API management and Platform-as-a-Service infrastructure.

“Today our customers have to make difficult choices on which different technology platform to pick that supports their requirements,” said Burley Kawasaki, senior vice president of products at Kony. “Kony MobileFabric is the first of its kind to considerably reduce this complexity by delivering an open, standards-based and unified mobile infrastructure platform regardless of their mobile development needs.”

(Related: How PaaS has evolved so far)

The product launch marks a shift to more loosely coupled architectures in mobile apps, according to Al Hilwa, analyst at IDC.

“As organizations start getting strategic with mobile application development, they are thinking in a somewhat more decoupled manner about their front ends on the devices and their back-end systems,” he said. “They are building back ends in line with new API architectures to handle not just mobile devices, but a brave new world of [Internet of Things] devices that need to engage with the enterprise.”

With MobileFabric, organizations can reduce the time it takes to get enterprise mobile apps to market, spend less time on app development, lower total cost of ownership, and get open native and multi-platform support, according to the company.

“MobileFabric sits in between your mobile app and your back-end enterprise systems and helps create a layer that loosely couples mobile ‘edge’ applications,” said Kawasaki. “This allows you to rapidly innovate and update apps at the edge at a faster pace of agility than you would typically do with your internal LOB systems.”

Other features include an open set of RESTful services; offline sync capabilities; and a multi-tenant and elastic fabric for cloud apps built on a natively cloud-based infrastructure.

More information is available here.

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