Cloud computing (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) has already proved its value to some businesses and specific applications. It provides a way to deploy and access massive amounts of IT resources, on demand, in real time. It drives better utilization of data center resources, reducing capital expenditures and operating expenses. Most important, it provides the scalability and agility to adapt to changing business needs.
However, challenges remain with the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing deployment model. For enterprises that have evaluated and deployed on-premise IaaS clouds or those that use public clouds, it’s obvious that IaaS clouds require application developers and IT practitioners to install, configure, customize, optimize, and manage their deployment environments – manual tasks somewhat counter to the promise of cloud computing’s “agility” value proposition. Also, IT administrators and application developers have to maintain deep technical knowledge of multiple software components, and monitor and manage them.
Platform-as-a-Service frees application developers from infrastructure issues
With Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), enterprises and developers get a higher value. Software stacks are pre-configured and pre-integrated in PaaS and can be available within minutes. The PaaS model abstracts the application layer from the application infrastructure; this step eliminates the need to manage infrastructure software and provides an easy-to-manage, standardized, integrated stack and multi-tenant deployment platform. PaaS technologies provide monitoring, management and auto-scaling engines that resize the resources allocated to each application in real time, taking full advantage of the scalability of the cloud. Additional platform services can be dynamically added to the PaaS globally.
The ultimate benefit is simple: developers can develop. No longer are they responsible for managing, monitoring and dynamic resource scaling. That task belongs to the PaaS platform, managed by a centralized IT department.
In addition, the PaaS model offers flexibility to build and deploy a standard set of shared components so all applications are deployed with a consistent set of software versions and releases. Centralized IT executives have full control to maintain a homogeneous and standardized development and deployment platform across the enterprise, simplifying IT operations and reducing the time needed to deliver IT resources or platforms to their departmental constituents.
Choices for enterprises for applications in the cloud
As IT organizations prepare their applications and infrastructure for cloud deployment, they must deal with enormous complexity. They must consider issues such as new deployment architectures, management and monitoring of cloud resources, application lifecycle management, software support on clouds, licensing, security, scalability, and the thorny problem of migrating existing custom applications to the cloud. Based on the application data security and compliance needs and their goals in adopting cloud computing models, enterprises have the following options to move existing applications or develop new applications:
* Acquire similar applications from SaaS vendors such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SuccessFactors, or RightNow. This option best suits database-centric enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, etc. and may not apply to business-specific custom applications. However, this approach means writing off investments in existing applications and software licenses and can lead to vendor lock-in.
* Move custom applications to a public PaaS, such as Salesforce.com’s force.com, Microsoft Azure or Google App Engine; however, this option also involves a high degree of re-write and vendor lock-in, as public PaaS providers require the use of proprietary SDKs and data models. Current offerings also may not be suitable to some enterprises that must adhere to privacy and compliance standards. Further, these vendors could be a poor fit because of their limited functionality.
* Do-it-yourself PaaS. While technically doable, it is complex and could take six months to a year.
* Off-the-shelf PaaS. Use a PaaS-enablement solution vendor to build a PaaS using the set of application infrastructure components that are currently used within an enterprise and on a choice of private and public clouds.
Enterprise Java PaaS Requirements
Because of Java ubiquity in the enterprise, IT departments have invested heavily to develop and deploy Java applications on software stacks from Oracle, IBM and Red Hat. Ideally, enterprises that wish to move applications to clouds should be able to leverage their investments in skill sets, application code and infrastructure software, without re-writing applications.
Enterprises should also be able to create their own standards-based Java PaaS on public clouds such as Amazon EC2, or private clouds such as VMware, Eucalyptus or Cloud.com using the middleware they already have.
In other words, enterprises should look for a PaaS solution that is truly architected to put IT in the driver’s seat. It must allow enterprises that prefer to run their private PaaS on Amazon EC2 to set up an enterprise-wide master account with access controls, quotas, and hard/soft limits on cloud resources for users and departments to be able to manage capacity, usage, security and compliance. Application developers and QA/testing teams in turn have the flexibility of an on-demand PaaS while maintaining security and compliance, as well as controlling expenses in a manageable fashion. The same functionality should be available for on-premise private clouds.
Opportunities for Cloud Service Providers
As data center outsourcing to hosting providers continues to be one of the primary initiatives in enterprises, hosting providers are evolving their offerings to accommodate IT and management requirements for new SaaS business applications and legacy custom applications. Hosting providers should consider providing Java PaaS solutions as a service to their independent software vendors and enterprise customers. Such standard PaaS solutions give enterprises and ISVs a common platform to deploy new applications and easily migrate their existing applications to the cloud. Hosting providers can also integrate a Java PaaS solution into their own IaaS environments and offer a more valuable, more complete platform solution to customers. Additionally, a Java PaaS offering would enable service providers to compete with proprietary cloud offerings in the marketplace.
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