PaaSLane: The Fast Lane to Cloud Migration

PaaSLane: The Fast Lane to Cloud Migration

By Doug Barney

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one of the least understood, but potentially most useful of all the cloud services.

Cloud Technology Partners hopes MSPs and customers alike will understand how its PaaSLane, newly announced and now in beta, will help both constituencies move more easily to the cloud, and have a better experience once they get there.

PaaSLane, as its name implies, is focused on the applications. The tool reportedly only takes minutes to profile your source code, figure out if it presents any issues in moving to the cloud, and then tells IT and DevOps what it will take to make the migration.

The company claims this is far different than manual approaches. Having programmers go line by line can take several months. And you have to pay for all these developer man hours.

Instead of that, PaaSLane offers an automated system. The tool has a built in rules engine that discovers compatibility problems and areas of difficulty with cloud compliance.

“Our clients are moving hundreds of enterprise applications to multiple cloud platforms and need an effective way to clearly identify issues and estimate the effort required to make the move. We built PaaSLane to systematically accelerate migrating applications to the cloud,” said John Treadway, senior vice president at Cloud Technology Partners. “PaaSLane inspects application code to find the underlying causes of these issues in a matter of minutes so development teams can start fixing them immediately.”

One PaaS player likes what he sees from PaaSLane. “ActiveState's Stackato PaaS technology has always supported enterprise development teams that code in multiple languages,” said Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState. “We're pleased to work with Cloud Technology Partners to enable easier migration of existing applications to the cloud with PaaSLane.”

Cloud Foundry, another PaaS platform, is likewise gearing to support PaaSLane. “We are working closely with enterprises and members of our ecosystem including Cloud Technology Partners to define enterprise PaaS,” said James Watters, head of product at Pivotal Cloud Foundry. “Enterprises are seeking ‘on-ramps’ to a platform like Cloud Foundry that make their overall application delivery pipeline and development more agile and productive. We are excited that PaaSLane speeds the transition of applications to PaaS and has strong support for Cloud Foundry out of the box.”

Acing the PaaS Exam

There are three main cloud services layers. At the bottom of the stack is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is raw computing infrastructure, usually servers and associated network that one accesses over the Internet.

PaaS is a full layer above and provides a development platform for writing, then running applications. Above that is Software as a Service (SaaS), which is really just packaged software deployed in the cloud.

This, of course, is all blurring. Some PaaSes are fully decoupled from IaaS, and some PaaSes are intensely coupled with IaaS. That means some IaaS offering are becoming more like a PaaS and vice versa.

And not all applications are mere applications. Many are themselves development platforms, so some SaaSes, even Saleforce.com, are adding PaaS features.

And with some much activity in the PaaS market, it now comes in dozens of forms, including:

  • Integration PaaS – this helps IT integrate software with and through cloud services.
  • Application PaaS (aPaaS) – this is a beefed-up style of PaaS. aPaaS includes a full software architecture, but adds important developer tools. Some of these tools are model-driven and visual so you no longer need to write code.
  • Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) – here, business processes are outsourced and the service provider handles Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and other metrics.

Today’s PaaS can also run corporate apps as well as commercial apps (here the PaaS acts a bit like a SaaS). PaaS also now supports an array of development types such as mobile, social apps and Web apps.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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