Developers, why use a PaaS?
Ross Mason on Monday, May 16, 2011
While cloud trends have been gaining momentum over the lat 8 years or so, developers have largely been nonplused. After all, both SaaS and IaaS largely affect the business and IT (and developers are largely allergic to buzz words and trends). However, PaaS is all about the developer. PaaS addresses the part where we build stuff.
One aspect of PaaS that is often overlooked is that it solves a major source of friction between developers and IT operations. In most organization developers need to rely on IT to get hardware, OS, servers and configuration. And they need to ask for any changes over time. This is usually cumbersome since the goal of developers and IT operations are not aligned. IT operations are there to govern and control, making sure the company is not exposed, developers need to build applications and deliver quickly so that the business can start seeing value.
For Developers PaaS represents a new level of freedom – a break away from dealing with system architecture, servers and configuration. A PaaS provides the reference architecture, scalability, and reliability and base configuration meaning developers can go straight into writing applications without all that other baggage.
All PaaS offerings are a bit different, so I’m going to use Mule iON as an example to lay out a workflow that defines the steps you’d need to go through to build a scalable architecture. You’ll notice the steps are fairly common, but often non-trivial.
Mule iON takes care of all of this for you. The architecture used means your integrations can scale and REST or Web Services are load balanced. If you need to scale, it will scale, you don;t need to do anything else. With Mule iON the workflow changes to:
One nice thing about our platfrom is that we just raised the bar on development tools with Mule Studio. It enables you to build integration flows graphically or through code. You can run your applications locally and deploy to Mule iON with one click. Pretty cool, but that’s just the beginning.
We’re about to launch Mule iON to the public, I will be providing a feature tour later this week to whet your appetite.
Related posts:
- What is PaaS (Platform as a Service)
- Introducing integration PaaS (iPaaS)
- JIRA: not just for Mule developers
- Identity Management for the Cloud