That’s the title of an article I wrote for InfoQ and which went live today.
If you can get past the punny title you’ll read about the following points:
- In traditional (and IaaS) environments, many available application infrastructure features remain rarely used because of the cost (perceived or real) or adding them to the operational environment.
- Most PaaS environments of today don’t even let you make use of these features, at any cost, because of constraints imposed by PaaS providers for the sake of simplifying and streamlining their operations.
- In the future, PaaS will not only make these available but available at a negligible incremental operational cost.
- Even beyond that, PaaS will make available application services that are, in traditional settings, completely out of scope for the application programmer. Early examples include CDN, DNS and loab balancing services offered, for example, by Amazon. An application developer in most traditional data centers would have to jump through endless hoops if she wanted to control these services within the application. I believe that these network-related services are just the low hanging fruits and many more once-unthinkable infrastructure services will become programmable as part of the application.
PaaS will become less about “hosting” and more about offering application services. In other words, going back to the formula I proposed on Twitter:
Cloud = Hosting + SOA
IaaS is a lot more “hosting” than SOA, PaaS is a lot more “SOA” (application infrastructure services available via APIs) than “hosting”.
You can read the full article for more.