Guest View: The pitfalls of platform as a service
By David Abramowski
August 1, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 3)
The news that search and ad revenue monster Google has decided to unfurl yet another tentacle, this time to grab a chunk of the application development platform world, comes as no real surprise.
Platform as a service (PaaS) is an attractive, exciting, rapidly evolving extension of software as a service (SaaS) application delivery that, if used correctly and intelligently, could support a complete end-to-end hosting and managed service environment for Web applications. PaaS gives developers a break from worrying about the costs and other overhead of managing complicated infrastructure, and leaves them with the peace of mind that a preconfigured environment offers to focus purely on building apps.
What is surprising is that Google would so flagrantly attempt to lock in a captive user community with such a clumsy PaaS offering. At first glance, Google App Engine seems an enticing proposition for independent application developers. After all, Google is a well-known and widely respected brand in other technology spheres. It could make sense to buy into the same systems that power Google’s own applications. On the face of it, the company is offering a fully integrated application environment for free. What’s not to like? Well, quite a lot, if you ask me.
The basic idea behind PaaS is to provide a physical place for Web application deployment, delivery and continuing management, without requiring developers to download, install and configure software on their hosting servers. Rather than thinking about machines that need configuring, servers and databases become simply connected places that make it all work.
PaaS must be reliable, fast, secure, managed and capable of running Web applications successfully in diverse modern environments. A true PaaS isn’t just software, or even a collection of powerful software and hardware; it’s also about a bunch of driven humans working to ensure the platform performs and responds elegantly to any problems.
Sadly, it now appears Google may be at the forefront of companies looking to use PaaS to create their own ecosystems, which lock in users to serve their own purposes. Superficially, they are promoting and providing a cool environment in which people can code, but drawbacks all arise from how proprietary these environments are.
Related Search Term(s): SOA & SaaS, software development, Google
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