Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - PaaS

• There have been a lot of announcements lately around Red Hat’s OpenShift v3 plans, specifically around Docker and Kubernetes.  OpenShift v3 is being built around the central idea of user applications running in Docker containers with scheduling/management support provided by the Kubernetes project, and augmented deployment, orchestration, and routing functionality built on top.
• This means if you can run your application in a Docker container, you can run it in OpenShift v3.
• If you’re not familiar with the basic concepts of Docker images/containers, and Kubernetes Replication Controllers, Services, and Pods, it will be helpful to read up on those items first:
• Docker image:  Defines a filesystem for running an isolated Linux process (typically an application)
• Docker container: Running instance of a Docker image with its own isolated filesystem, network, and process spaces.
• Pod: Kubernetes object that groups related Docker containers that need to share network, filesystem or memory together for placement on a node.

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• Those “many places” would include PivotalCF, or IBM BlueMix or HP Helion or whatever iteration of Cloud Foundry it deems most appropriate. That would alleviate corporate concerns of platform or vendor lock-in but is also a tall order
• Another (unspoken) part of the foundation’s aim is to show that Cloud Foundry is not under the control of one vendor — Pivotal or its parent company VMware — so bringing in these big names and their code contributions is a plus.
• To expedite logistics, the Cloud Foundry leadership signed the Linux Foundation to provide staffing, legal assistance and help with events

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• CloudBees, the backer of PaaS and Jenkins continuous-integration servers, has announced it is departing the public PaaS business and shutting down its RUN@cloud. Instead, the company will focus exclusively on its Jenkins Enterprise product, business and opportunity.
• The company also announced a partnership with Pivotal Software to offer Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees on its Pivotal Network as an add-on service beginning later this year

• Enterprise-class workloads require more than 'best effort' from IaaS providers. This is the departure point for Dimension Data's maneuver into providing cloud services for SAP ERP.
• Using its Managed Cloud Platform (MCP), Dimension Data is able to support the deployment of different enterprise applications spanning communications services, bespoke applications, three tier applications or applications such as SAP.

• Container management specialist Docker has sold off its dotCloud business line to cloudControl, the U.S. subsidiary of the Berlin, Germany-based cloudControl GmbH for an undisclosed amount; Docker plans to announce the news today.

• One of the surveys, conducted among 1,358 IT and business pros by GigaOm Research and North Bridge Venture partners, clearly illustrated the dramatic rise in PaaS usage with just 7 percent of respondents stating they used PaaS in 2011 and 41 percent saying they now use the technology. Within two years, the survey shows that number will rise to 62 percent.
• The push for faster development from business stakeholders is understandable given overall cloud trends. The GigaOm survey reports that 65 to 70 percent of respondents will move some or significant business application processing to the cloud in the next one to two years.
• This trend is led by front-office business functions, with 52 percent of sales and marketing moving significant portions of application load to the cloud 44 percent of customer service and 44 percent of business analytics.

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• An outgrowth of service registries and repositories from the days of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), this new and improved technology provides a single gateway for service access for applications and end users.
• Enterprises that lack cloud services catalogs miss out on the advantages of centralized control, centralized discovery, and centralized access
• Not surprisingly, effective governance (including the use of cloud management platforms [CMPs]) becomes the single most important reason that cloud services catalogs exist for enterprises.
• As we move to multi-cloud types of architectures that leverage a mixture of public and private clouds, IT quickly becomes the broker of cloud services
• Their services catalogs are typically bound to CMPs, or other resource governance and/or service management infrastructure that leverage these catalogs as the single version of the truth, and include
• • What services are available, and what these services do.
   
  • Security and access polices that determine who can leverage what services, and for what reasons.
   
  • The ability to track dependencies, such as what services are made up of other services.
   
  • The ability to link with core DevOps processes and tools, including continuous integration and continuous delivery.
   
  • The ability to track the changes made to services over time, including those that exist in the public cloud and locally within the enterprise
• The cloud services catalog, in most instances I see, is the key to automated provisioning and deployment because it provides a single point of reference for the cloud services.
• The services catalog must be kept scrupulously up to date so that users always have a clear picture of the available services and resources.
• The services catalog of today differs from services catalogs found in the initial days of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) in that the underlying technology details are usually not provided to the users
• The rationale is that keeping the implementation details behind the catalog, as it were, provides IT with the maximum flexibility to obtain resources from either private or public clouds.
• First we need an understanding and inventory of existing services within existing enterprise systems, and newer private and public clouds, or other services that should be identified and listed in the catalog.
• Next, it’s time to understand how the use of these services can be automated.
• First is resource governance (including CMPs), and the second is service governance.
• There are two paths to consider here
• Resource governance deals with collections of services or resources that exist within major entities, and is also known as macro governance.
• Service governance is the same as resource governance, but at a more fine-grained level, and is otherwise known as micro governance.
• Operation of the services catalog must take the use of automation into consideration
• As you move toward construction of a cloud services catalog, you need to define the value that this concept and its supporting technology bring to the organization.

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• OnApp’s big federated cloud play will soon be here in the shape of Cloud.net, a user-facing marketplace for memory, storage, CPU and bandwidth that’s leaning heavily on transparency as a selling point.
• Can a global federation of smaller cloud providers successfully rival the mighty Amazon EC2 in the cloud compute market?
• OnApp has finally unveiled its federated compute marketplace, drawing on the spare capacity of many telcos and other providers that use OnApp’s cloud orchestration toolkit.
• Cloud.net is basically a price comparison portal for memory, storage, CPU and bandwidth, with one bill and one interface.
• Cloud.net is where OnApp has been going for a few years now and, let’s face it, the name could make for a pretty good brand.

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• Cloud Foundry was made to speed up the deployment and lifecycle management of modern greenfield apps.
• In many enterprises, this made up a small percentage of deployed workloads
• For today and future needs, a modern platform should be able to deploy a diverse set of workloads, from a plain Operating System, all the way up to a greenfield application, and everything in-between.
• When we say OS to app and everything in-between, it's interesting that "in-between" is quickly being dominated by container-based workloads, e.g., Docker.
• Composable systems fit well with the Docker model
• While the dream of identical containers fitting onto ships and railways and trucks is great, we have reason to peek inside.

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• For roughly two years, Cloudways has delivered public cloud infrastructure resources from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and ElasticHosts in a value-added reseller model with a focus on specific content management and ecommerce application deployments (including WordPress, Magento, Drupal and Joomla)
• With its newly launched Click&Go product, Cloudways has engineered that organizational experience, along with its configuration and optimization expertise and a proprietary management console, into a PaaS offering. Launched in late February, Click&Go is intended to shift the company's business from a managed, hands-on service into a repeatable and scalable self-service offering.
• The Cloudways Click&Go product is representative of a growing trend in the traditional Web and application hosting market, in which customers are increasingly turning to application-specific PaaS offerings.
• Legacy hosting providers have taken note of the success of businesses like WP Engine and Acquia, which deliver custom configurations of open source tools on third-party infrastructure.
• While Cloudways has seen some early success in helping smaller customers to deploy popular applications on public cloud infrastructure on a consultative basis, the PaaS platform represents a far larger, more scalable opportunity. There is already a large ecosystem of providers serving this intermediary role with enterprise customers. A product that simplifies cloud consumption for small business is compelling.
• Cloudways' core Click&Go technology is a PaaS layer that sits between third-party infrastructure (AWS or DigitalOcean today, although it intends to consider adding further infrastructure providers over time) and a set of applications that includes WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, SugarCRM and PrestaShop, along with a basic PHP stack on which users can deploy PHP applications.
• The company's proprietary technology lies ins management console, which enables the end user to access specific resources, either on AWS or DigitalOcean (and to move workloads between the two).
• The platform relies on third-party IT automation and orchestration tools in the form of Puppet and MCollective.
• It has also partnered with Rackspace and DNS Made Easy to incorporate email and managed DNS into the product.
• Cloudways has chosen not to abstract the IaaS products underlying its PaaS services, a decision it suggests offers users the advantage of transparency into the company's pricing relative to the raw infrastructure.
• There is a long and growing list of PaaS providers in the market,
• Cloudways considers its services to be most like those of Engine Yard in concept because both expose the underlying resources, rather than obscuring them as part of the overall PaaS offering
• Engine Yard is more focused on supporting development environments
• Cloudways is focused on specific applications
• Cloudways will likely find itself in more direct competition for individual users with WordPress PaaS offerings from the likes of WP Engine, Pressable, Pagely and WordPress's own hosting service.
• managed WordPress hosting services from hosting providers
• Go Daddy
• DreamHost
• Endurance International Group
• Magento PaaS services are less common; however, several small providers include
• Elastera, Sonassi Hosting and Magento's own Magento Go service
• Rackspace, Peer 1 Hosting, Nexcess and ZeroLag
• Magento support
• Drupal is also supported by many traditional hosts, as well as PaaS services such as Acquia and Pantheon

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• On the face of it, Brooklyn could be seen as a next-gen DIY PaaS. Brooklyn creates bridges with existing and new applications to truly become the mainframe for running the entire show, providing continuous governance and real-time elasticity for mission-critical applications running in private, public or hybrid cloud environments. Surely something that is desired across the board by all companies working with security-critical applications

• Cloudsoft Corporation
• multi cloud application management provider, today announced that they are open sourcing Brooklyn multi-cloud application management platform under Apache license
• Brooklyn is a library that vastly simplifies application deployment and management across distributed systems
• deployment across multiple clouds
• offers a management plane that will make business policy driven deployment of applications and, eventually, ensuring that the application runs optimally
• The inbuilt autonomic management makes it easy to intelligently optimize applications across available machines, locations and clouds.
• Brooklyn is interesting from many different angles
• Federated Clouds
• Next-gen PaaS

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• CumuLogic refocused its attention in 2013 from providing a broad PaaS offering to offering a modular set of cloud services, including core PaaS as well as load balancing, SQL and NoSQL databases, caching and messaging.
• Pivotal, Cloud Foundry and Red Hat's OpenShift,
• CumuLogic's competition initially came from PaaS providers such as
• AppHarbor, Cloud Bees, Engine Yard, Google App Engine, Microsoft Windows Azure and salesforce.com's Heroku
• Following its shift to a more modular approach, we described
• ActiveState's Stackato as more directly comparable
• AppFog (now owned by CenturyLink)
• Docker must also be considered
• With specific reference to CumuLogic's SQL Database-as-Service and NoSQL Database-as-Service
• AWS with RDS and DynamoDB
• public DBaaS vendors, including
• Rackspace with ObjectRocket and Cloud Databases
• IBM with Cloudant
• Orchestrate
• CumuLogic maintains that barriers to adoption of public DBaaS include security/privacy and management concerns, as well as latency
• Oracle
• incumbent database providers are getting into the DBaaS game
• OpenStack's Trove, supported by Tesora
• DBaaS-enabling technologies such as
• VMware's vFabric Data Director
• GoGrid with its combination of database provisioning and orchestration software and cloud services

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• Jelastic, a cloud infrastructure software and support vendor, is pivoting from selling PaaS to hosters via traditional revenue sharing to providing integrated IaaS and PaaS software for large enterprises.
• While the company continues to sell its turnkey PaaS and managed private cloud software to service providers, it says there is a greater opportunity in selling its software to large enterprises. This 'platform as infrastructure' approach aligns with our thoughts on PaaS, which is being shaped by integration with IaaS as much as the polyglot programming trend that previously drove the PaaS category.

• Since being spun off of EMC and VMware in April 2013, Pivotal Software has been building and leveraging its key technology assets, which include the Cloud Foundry open source PaaS software and Pivotal HD Hadoop distribution. In November 2013, the company introduced Pivotal One, a commercially backed enterprise version of Cloud Foundry PaaS. It says it is continuing to grow its customers and revenue, helped along by key investors and partners that are also helping create a Cloud Foundry foundation to establish governance and oversight of the open source Cloud Foundry software project.

   
• Pivotal is forming a nonprofit, open source foundation for Cloud Foundry for open governance along the lines of the Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation and OpenStack Foundation.
• ActiveState, CenturyLink, EMC, HP, IBM, Rackspace, SAP and VMware

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• The Cloud Foundry open-source project looks set to become a standard piece of technology in the thriving distributed systems ecosystem: its main backer, Pivotal, has persuaded IBM, HP, SAP and Rackspace to join a new foundation dedicated to the tech.
• By creating an open governance model and funding a foundation to back it, Pivotal is trying to form a neutral Switzerland-like area where companies can collaborate in developing the Cloud Foundry software, while being able to hive off code and build their own products as well.

• As it stands, the companies will collectively work together to figure out what to spend their annual war chest of more than $3m a year on, though it's likely this will include marketing and perhaps some direct engineering as well.

• By bringing Rackspace, HP, and SAP into the scheme Pivotal has welcomed in IT giants that all compete with aspects of it and its parents EMC and VMware's core businesses.

• This, we think, raises a number of interesting questions. For one – what does it mean for the Rackspace-sponsored "Solum" cloud project, which launched in October as an antidote to Cloud Foundry? Given its juvenile state and less sophisticated set of partners (eBay, Red Hat, dotCloud, Cloudsoft, Ubuntu, and Cumulogic) we reckon its chances of ongoing life are very slim.

• Finally, it renders the position of cloud startup Apcera more delicate, given that the secretive company has little dialogue with the wider open-source community, and has so far failed to demonstrate a large amount of public customers of its mysterious technology.

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