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Platform as a service benefits web developers and SMEs
By Suman Ravikumar, SiliconIndia
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Friday, 12 November 2010, 17:08 IST
Bangalore: Cloud computing is not only the flavor of the month but will soon become the flavor of the decade. The world of cloud computing is constantly evolving due to its highly scalable architecture which gained attention five years ago. It is this area that all web developers and IT sector companies are betting on and have great expectations about its services. In 1997, when Internet boomed they realized that it would disrupt the industry and now the wheel has turned over to begin another disruption with the introduction of cloud computing.
A survey conducted by IT specialists shows that small to medium businesses are driving the uptake of cloud computing. In the first half of 2010, 14 percent of small and medium enterprises reported using cloud computing services, and another 10 percent reported plans to deploy cloud-based services. About 38 percent of small to medium sized enterprises SMEs with fewer than 20 employees use or plan to use cloud solutions in the next six months. Just 17 percent of organizations with between 20 and 99 employees have such plans, while 22 percent of organizations with more than 100 employees aim to do so.
The SMEs in the technology sector are adopting cloud computing at a faster pace whereas companies in the service sectors like finance, HR and consulting are using or planning to deploy the cloud at a rate of 22 percent. Most other industries trail closely behind with 20 percent adoption rates. SMEs are adopting cloud computing as there will be the ones who gain maximum out of it and they can act quickly to the changes.
Microsoft Senior Vice President Amithabh Srivastsava said "cloud will help companies release their products to market quickly at a lower cost. It will also save a lot of money." He said that Infrastructure as Service (IaaS) would reduce capital expenditure, while platform as a service (PaaS) would reduce both capital and operational expenditure, and allow companies to focus on their products. To get maximum gain from the cloud, companies should leap to PaaS, he added.
PaaS offers a hosted application stack that can be used to build and deploy a web application with no servers to configure or administer and can be accessed using a browser. The model makes all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users.
PaaS also provides some key advantages for web developers compared to any other hosted environment. Some of them are: developers spend years together and lot of time and energy in learning technologies like ASP.NET and general .NET framework in itself. In PaaS you will be able to use the same Application Program Interface (APIs) that they are familiar with.
Web developers can start off with small server capacity and then eventually when their web site traffic grows they can choose to request for more capacity. If web applications of developers are sitting in the cloud then they need to have a database in the cloud itself. With cloud storage you can now have your data in the cloud as well. If one of the server fails or the application goes down then there will be new server Virtual machines (VMs), behind the scenes that will take a back up of the developer's application.
It all began with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). SaaS builds a perfect model for its customers. A model that has the perfect economic benefits, quality-of-service, multi-tenancy, pay-as-you-go pricing, etc but when customers come up with something else that they need like add something more services or build services on the existing one, then SaaS is not flexible to make those changes neither could IaaS could That's when Platform-as-a-Service came into picture. The adoption of PaaS will be mainly driven by the developer ecosystem which builds interesting applications and that in turn will generate demand for the PaaS to grow.