A couple of weeks back, at the IBF Panel discussion on PaaS, we were discussing the opportunity for a Private PaaS. While a Private Cloud is typically associated with IaaS, I started to ponder on the value of a Private PaaS offering.

Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Azure Appliance at WPC underscores the significance of the Private PaaS. This appliance will remove the overhead of maintaining and running an environment to host applications. VMware is aggressively positioning it’s Spring framework on both Private and Public PaaS offerings. AppScale, the open source implementation of Google App Engine on EC2 and other standard VMs has a huge potential to become a Private PaaS. IBM WebSphere Cloudburst Appliance is another implementation of the Private PaaS. These appliances come with complete self-service capabilities and reduce the provisioning of development, test and production environments from days to few hours.

Let’s take a look at the scenarios and potential customers for the Private PaaS –

• Service Providers / Managed Data Centers – These are the next generation ISPs and companies who are into managed data center operations. By deploying PaaS in a box, they can focus on delivering the service to its customers vs. managing it. The multi-tenant capability which is core to the PaaS appliance will provide an isolated snapshot of the environment to the PaaS consumers.

• System Integrators – Large System Integrators who offer turnkey IT solutions can now offer PaaS to their strategic customers. This will enable SIs to deliver an end to end solution to the customers. System Integrators can now offer SLAs which are covered by the PaaS appliance providers. Customers will see value in this deal because the SI will own the entire lifecycle of the solution. This will also address the data security and compliance issues by keeping the sensitive data within the political boundaries of the country. I personally see this as a huge opportunity for the System Integrators in India.

• Large Enterprises – Large automotive, manufacturing and finance companies with presence all over the globe will be able to benefit from these PaaS appliances. By deploying a few in strategic locations, they will be able to reduce the maintenance cost of running Line of Business applications.

• Government – One of the niche customers of the PaaS appliance would be Government. By deploying state level appliances, the government will be able to create a secure Government Private Cloud. Since this runs within the premises of the government data centers, compliance and regulatory issues will not be a concern. Government can confidently store the data and run applications running a set of appliances deployed across the country.

This is an interesting space to watch. Do you see the potential for Private PaaS?

[This article was originally published in the Cloud Computing Journal]

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com

IBF Media has been running a series of events called Capital Connection 2010 which is focused on serving the needs of entrepreneurs looking to connect with participants in the venture capital eco-system, technology executives, and to get access to capital and resources to help build their growing enterprises.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

The latest in the series was a panel discussion on ‘Cloud Platforms and Solutions: Business Models and Architectures for Value Creation in the Enterprise’. The emphasis was more on the value that Platform as a Service (PaaS) brings to an enterprise. The organizers managed to get the best PaaS providers in the business – Google, Microsoft and OrangeScape. While I represented Microsoft Corporation as the subject matter expert on Windows Azure, we had Rajdeep Dua from Google to provide the Google App Engine context. Suresh Sambandam, CEO of OrangeScape PaaS (which incidentally supports both GAE and Azure) was also one of the panelists. The session was moderated by Raghavan Subramanian from Infosys who did a great job of asking very relevant questions to the panel and driving a meaningful discussion.

The discussion was very lively and made it interesting and valuable for the attendees and panelists. I want to share the answers to the questions that were asked in the panel. This represents only the points that I shared and not the views of other panelists in the discussion.

Q) What does your company offer in terms of PaaS? What are the key differentiators?
A) Microsoft’s PaaS offering is called Windows Azure Platform.

There are three key services within this –

• Windows Azure – The Cloud OS from Microsoft
• SQL Azure – Relational Database for the Cloud
• Windows Azure AppFabric – Bridge between on-premise and Cloud Services

Key differentiators –

• Based on familiar .NET Platform
• Great integration with Visual Studio and 3rd party tools
• Reliable SLAs for the enterprise
• Integration with on-premise assets
• Choice of storage between relational (SQL Azure) and non-relational (Azure Storage)

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) What is the threat faced from the layers above (SaaS) and below (IaaS) PaaS?
A) I believe the line drawn between IaaS and PaaS is blurring slowly. Windows Azure is clearly a meta-platform and customers can run Java, PHP, Perl along with .NET applications. Worker role and Native Execution mode enables to port legacy applications to Azure. Since Microsoft also plays in the SaaS layer through the Microsoft Online services, it is an opportunity for us rather than threat. We encourage ISVs to build SaaS offerings on Azure.

Q) Who is the target audience? Is it ISVs or enterprise?
A) Our target audience is the following –

• ISV – Offer SaaS based solutions of their existing or new applications
• Enterprise – Move seasonal and on-demand Line of Business (LoB) applications to Azure
• Start-up – Go live quickly by avoiding up-front investment in infrastructure
• System Integrators – Offer migration and integration of Cloud Services

Q) What is the role of standards for lowering the entry barrier?
A) Standards are applicable at multiple levels. Here are a few

• Security Standards – Azure is SAS70 complaint
• Industry Standards – Supporting industry specific standards like HIPAA
• Open Standards – Azure storage, compute and management APIs are based on open standards like HTTP, XML and REST.

Q) Are there Cloud friendly languages? Do programming languages need new constructs to target cloud capabilities like multi-tenancy?
A) Developers interact with the Cloud in one of the two ways –

• Consume APIs and interact with the Cloud through the management API
• Develop applications that get deployed on the Cloud platform

For consuming the APIs, any language with support for HTTP libraries will work. More than languages the frameworks like .NET and Java need to evolved to support Cloud. For example .NET developers are able to leverage the LINQ constructs to interact with the Cloud storage efficiently.

IBF Media PaaS Panel Discussion

Q) How do you assure continuity of business? Are you a viable and reliable vendor for the enterprises to bet their business on your Cloud platform?
A) Microsoft has been in the data center business for 15 years. Hotmail was acquired in 1977, Outlook Web Access (OWA) was launched 11 years ago. Hosted Exchange processes more than 1 billion messages per month. More than 2000 institutions signed up for Live@Edu with millions of email accounts. Enterprise customers trust us as we have been a credible player for more than a decade. Windows Azure has the right level of SLAs defined which raises the confidence level of our customers.

Q) How about 3rd party components and licensing on the Cloud?
A) Most of the component vendors are aligning with the Cloud. Players like PayPal started to offer services for the SaaS developers by collaborating with PaaS providers. Companies like Twilio are bringing telephony to the Cloud. Most of the components will evolve to support the new paradigm.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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• Speaking at Capital Connection 2010

The expectations around Cloud Computing are very high. It is one of the most discussed terminologies among CIOs, developers and IT managers. While there is certainly more hype around it than what it really is, Cloud Computing is definitely promising. Gartner calls the year 2010 as the year of Cloud Computing. No doubt! Cloud Computing will redefine the IT management and data center operations. This article attempts to look at the Cloud through the eyes of an Entrepreneur, developer, IT manager and the consumer.

Entrepreneur – The most important factor that any entrepreneur considers is the IT budget. The challenge is to optimize the budget between human resources and IT infrastructure. As a startup entrepreneur, you may have an innovative idea and one of the best business models. But determining the right no. of servers to go live is not an easy task. You face the risk of over investing or under investing in the infrastructure. This is where Cloud offers tremendous value. Cloud is elastic by nature. Technically, you can start with one server and potentially scale to hundreds of servers on demand. One of the key tenets of the Cloud is pay-by-use. Through this, businesses can move their infrastructure to the Cloud and only pay for what they use. Based on the business demand, they can decide to scale out by ‘hiring’ more servers on demand and scale down when done. This will turn the CAPEX on IT infrastructure into OPEX. Budding entrepreneurs can benefit from this ‘elastic’ nature of Cloud by paying for what they really use. So, if you are an entrepreneur, you should explore the pay-by-use model that some of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like Amazon and GoGrid offer. The other important attribute of the Cloud is Self-Service. To manage the Cloud infrastructure, you need not hire full time IT administrators. Most of the Cloud services have easy to manage self-service portals. This is true for Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings like Microsoft Business Productivity Suite offering Cloud based messaging and collaboration services. Bottom line – Cloud will help entrepreneurs save the upfront cost of infrastructure.

Developers – Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering targets the developers. The most popular developer platforms are .NET and Java. In an ideal world, developers never worry about the provisioning and the infrastructure plumbing tasks. PaaS brings the Cloud close to developers by freeing them from worrying about the provisioning and the IT management chores. PaaS promises the best of the abilities to the developers which include Scalability, Reliability, Availability and Security. Through this developers will design, develop, build, debug and test their applications on inexpensive local machines that run the stack of their choice.  Once they are confident, they will move their code to run on the world’s best datacenters running some of the proven services. Microsoft Windows Azure platform and Google App Engine are the popular PaaS offerings. Both offer tools and SDK to enable developers to emulate the Cloud environment locally for development. By deploying onto Microsoft Windows Azure platform, developers run their applications on the same infrastructure that powers Bing, Windows Live and other web services from Microsoft.

IT Manager – Cloud is available to organizations in one of the two forms – Private Cloud or Public Cloud. Private Cloud brings the benefit of Cloud Computing to the enterprise by running within the organizational boundaries. Public Cloud is managed and run by vendors who offer the services on subscription. IT Managers will typically start by setting up a Private Cloud that acts as a test bed. After the pilot, they deploy the Private Cloud that can be leveraged by multiple internal teams. Private Clouds will drastically reduce the time and the management overhead involved in provisioning the new servers. IT Managers can then optimize the administrator’s time effectively. The task of setting up new servers that may typically runs into few weeks to provision will be reduced to few hours on a Private Cloud. Individual teams will be empowered to configure and take control of their infrastructure needs. Private Cloud can be based on Microsoft Windows Hyper-V or VMware. Based on the compliance and the regulations, IT Manages can move data and heavy computing tasks to the Public Cloud.

Consumers – With ubiquitous access to Internet, most of the traditional tasks of knowledge workers and consumers are moving to the Cloud. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a form of a Cloud that the end-users will experience. With the traditional approach, consumers will have to buy the software and licenses that may result in huge capital expenditure. They end up paying for features and products that they may not use very often. When the same software is offered as a service on the Cloud, consumers will have the option for subscribing to features/products that they care about. This results in better Return on Investment (RoI). Salesforce.com has been in the CRM business since 2001. They were the first to offer traditional CRM on subscription. Recently it is Zoho and Google Docs that became popular as the consumer SaaS offerings. Going forward, most of the office suits and Line of Business (LoB) applications will be offered as SaaS. Microsoft’s Office 2010 has the free Office Web Applications. Other popular services from Microsoft like Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, Live Meeting are offered on subscription along with other Microsoft services like Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).

In summary, there is something for everyone on the Cloud. IT Managers are aligned with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) while developers are aligned with the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and finally consumers will subscribe to the Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

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The landscape of the application development platform is divided into two – .NET and Java. When Microsoft announced .NET a decade back, I expected that they would officially come out with an Application Server to compete with the Weblogic and the Webspheres of the world. But Microsoft’s pitch has always been that Windows Server has it all! Every instance of Windows Server can be enabled for an ‘Application Role‘ which includes Web Server (IIS), Development Runtime (.NET), Enterprise Services (COM+), Message Queuing (MSMQ) and Web Services (WCF).

Borland (Borland ES), IBM (WebSphere), Sun/Oracle/BEA (Glassfish, OC4J & WebLogic), Redhat (JBoss), SAP (NetWeaver) and others like Apache (Geronimo) created a niche market for J2EE Application Servers offering the application services running within the Java context.

Any enterprise customer deciding to deploy an Application Server will first zero-in on the development platform. If it is Microsoft, the choice is simple; it is Windows Server. But, if the enterprise application is Java based, then there are quite a few Application Servers to choose from. So, the Application Server market is primarily divided between .NET and J2EE.

Fast forward this to 2010 and I feel this is pretty much repeated in the Cloud within the PaaS landscape. After announcing a partnership with SalesForce.com, VMware has made another huge announcement at the Google I/O event. Google App Engine now supports Spring framework powered by VMware! I always complained that Google’s App Engine is limited in its capability and the massive re-factoring that has to be done for porting an application to GAE. With Google and VMware springing (pun intended) the surprise, both these concerns are addressed. Now any Java developer can download and setup the Spring environment on his/her machine and then target Google App Engine for deployment.

When I first read about VMware’s Open PaaS vision, I have to admit that I didn’t take it too seriously. But now that they are on a signing spree with the partners to support Spring on their respective Cloud environments, it looks very promising. Every Java developer can now choose to deploy either on SalesForce or Google App Engine. I have a feeling that VMware is talking to IBM, Oracle and others who have the potential to make it big on the Cloud. What is more exciting is that the enterprises can setup a Private Cloud running on VMware’s VSphere running the same PaaS and then deploy and switch across multiple Cloud vendors. If VMware succeeds in convincing every major Java PaaS vendor to support Spring, it can safely claim to have created an Open PaaS platform. Spring insulates the Java Cloud applications from the underlying PaaS and brings in portability. This delivers the much talked about Cloud Portability at least in the Java PaaS environments.

VMware's Open PaaS

Five years from now, the PaaS world would be again divided between Microsoft (Windows Azure) and rest of the world (Java PaaS potentially powered by Spring).

Do you agree with my viewpoint?

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

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• VMforce – What’s in it for us?
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• My Interview on Cloud at IndicThreads.com

Yesterday, SalesForce.com and VMware jointly announced a new PaaS offering called VMforce. This is a huge announcement that has a very strong impact on the Cloud ecosystem. Let’s see what it means to us.

The enterprise application development platform is dominated by two obvious platforms – .NET and Java. I qualified my statement with the ‘enterprise’ keyword because other platforms like LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Python are great for consumer web apps and they are not the first choice for building the Line of Business (LoB) applications. So, when the enterprise wants to seriously look at the Cloud, they want a platform exposing either .NET or Java as a service. The application platform on the Cloud is technically called as the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Till date, PaaS is typically associated with Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, Google App Engine and Force.com. Windows Azure is the preferred platform for all the .NET developers. In the last one year, Microsoft’s continuous investments in Azure made it comprehensive and mature for the businesses to go live on the Cloud. Java developers had to settle for the limited capabilities offered by Google App Engine. Right from the day of announcement of Java runtime on App Engine, Google did very little to entice the Java community. Moving an enterprise Java app to GAE is not really straight forward. GAE doesn’t support all the capabilities of Java EE. Even for the web applications, there are quite a few constraints that force the developers to re-factor the application to run on GAE. Moving an app back and forth from the local datacenter and GAE is not easy. So, there has been no comparable PaaS offering to Azure for Java developers. In one of my articles, I covered how Sun lost the opportunity of delivering the Java PaaS to the community. This gap is now being filled by VMforce. They want to make VMforce the defacto Cloud platform for Java developers. VMforce for Java developers would be what Azure is for .NET developers.

VMforce PaaS Offering

But why did VMware join hands with SalesForce.com? VMware has a proven stack for the Cloud in the form of vSphere and vCloud. They never wanted to compete directly with the IaaS providers like AWS or GoGrid. Instead, VMware wants to capture the Private Cloud market by aggressively competing with Microsoft and others. On the other hand, SalesForce.com has been in Cloud services business for a while and has become synonymous with SaaS. They also started to expose the middle tier that powers their CRM through the force.com PaaS offering. SalesForce.com has the right level of infrastructure that is ready to scale. But just virtualization combined with the right infrastructure doesn’t offer an exciting platform for the developers. VMware made two strategic investments last year. They acquired a Java framework and tools company called SpringSource and a Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) company called RabbitMQ. This investment made VMware ready for a complete platform offering. Just like VMware brings an abstraction layer between the real hardware and the OS, SpringSource adds a layer between Java runtime and enterprise applications. Java developers targeting SpringSource can easily move apps across multiple environments. Message Queuing is very important for enterprise application scalability. The combo of SpringSource and RabbitMQ offer a powerful and scalable enterprise Java environment. Now, when we look at the equation, it becomes pretty interesting. VMware offering the SpringSource framework for the on-premise servers and the Private Cloud that can be further extended to the Public Cloud hosted on SalesForce.com. Add the LoB components, the multi-tenant capability, enterprise database and the UI widgets that are already a part of force.com, they have a pretty solid PaaS in the making.

Deployment Scenarios

Who should be worried about this announcement? It is Google! They have a serious contender in VMforce. As a developer, I prefer setting up SpringSource environment on my local machine and use Eclipse to seamlessly deploy across my local server, Private Cloud or on the VMforce Public Cloud. I need not heavily re-factor my applications for the Cloud anymore. Relying on a proven Java framework like Spring gives the developers the confidence to standardize their apps across multiple deployment environments. But, should Microsoft be worried about this announcement? Yes. But not as much as Google! Microsoft did the right thing by bringing .NET to the Cloud early and helping the developers make a smooth transition. For any Microsoft shop, the first choice is Azure and Microsoft will continue to lead in that space.

Do you think VMforce will deliver on its promise? Let me know your thoughts!

Janakiram MSV is a Cloud Computing Strategist specializing in industry's leading Cloud Computing offerings. Whether you are a developer, architect or an entrepreneur, he can help you get started on the Cloud Computing strategy. Janakiram comes with 10 years of experience in engaging with businesses on architecting enterprise solutions.

Related Posts

• A Case for Private PaaS
• IBF Media’s PaaS Panel Discussion
• Is it Azure vs. Rest of the World on the Cloud?
• Cloud Computing – What’s in it for you?
• Who Will Win The Cloud Computing Battle in India?