The journey of PaaS seeks value in the dilemma of survival

  

The IaaS layer is closer to the traditional IDC room in terms of service content. It is basically the same thing as the previous IT infrastructure. It is more manageable, more flexible, and (in theory) lower cost. The world's largest IaaS service provider is Amazon, the second child in North America is RackSpace, and Microsoft's Azure is third. Domestic counterparts, in addition to some IDC companies have changed their products to IaaS, as well as Alibaba Cloud, Shanda Cloud from the Internet industry, Huawei Cloud from the hardware industry, telecommunications, mobile from the carrier industry Cloud, there are also cloud bases (from the real estate industry) across the country. Going fine, some people will count the services such as CDN as IaaS, so the service providers of foreign Akamai and domestic blue dragons can also be counted among them.

The SaaS layer is the closest layer to the user. Previously, the mail service, web service, and network disk storage service were now on the SaaS. In terms of function, it is actually no different from the previous one, except that under the benchmark of “cloud computing”, the overall application scale is more extensive, and the response of the service is more intelligent (such as being able to locate the user's region and language). The service content itself is also enriched with the development of Web technologies. In addition to emails, web pages, and web-based disks, SaaS is currently recognized by Salesforce at the traditional enterprise level, and a series of Google Apps including Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, etc. Personality like video sites, iCloud or App Store, blogs, social networks, and more.

In theory, if you have a service to provide, then buy some IaaS platform resources, then deploy your service to this IaaS, and then modify it to be smarter, which is equivalent to a DIY SaaS is gone.

So, what about PaaS?

PaaS definition and difficulties

App Engine, a rather Geek atmosphere of English phrases. Since the advent of Google App Engine, this phrase has become synonymous with PaaS. In a sense, GAE not only defines a name, but also lays the foundation for a PaaS: the developer as a service object. The level of service is between IaaS and SaaS, which can be understood as the service of a middleware. Developers come up with this platform, write programs in languages ​​such as Java and Python, and submit the code directly to complete the deployment.

The following table lists the current hot PaaS platforms in several markets.

Service Name Manufacturers behind Release time Supported languages ​​Remarks

Heroku Salesforce (acquired in 2010) June 2007 Ruby, Java, Node.js, Scala, Clojure, Python, PHP

GAE Google April 2008 Python, Java, Go

SAE Sina November 2009 PHP, Java (in beta), Python (in beta)

BAE Baidu started beta in around 2010 PHP, Java is still in beta

OpenShift Red Hat May 2011 Ruby, Java, Node.js, Perl, Python, PHP Open source in 2012

Cloud Foundry VMware November 2011 Java, Scala, .NET
The above data is until June 2012

It seems to be very good: developers no longer need to entangle any environment deployment, nor Need operation and maintenance support, as long as you develop your own development skills, you can create new applications for target users around the world. But in reality, PaaS is really in a difficult situation:

1. For developers, the public cloud is first used to save money, and PaaS is always theoretically better than IaaS. expensive.

2, small and medium-scale environmental deployment is not difficult for the average developer, most developers will not open a new environment for new applications every day, resulting in the advantages of PaaS.

3, large-scale applications have customized requirements for the underlying architecture, but PaaS is not as easy to implement on IaaS.

Three questions point to the selling point of PaaS, which is one aspect; for PaaS service providers, it is a more difficult problem:

1. PaaS is above IaaS Layer, there is more to do. If you do IaaS alone, you can change it with OpenStack or some virtualization technology. PaaS has no ready-made implementation. You can only write it yourself. You need to consider many resource limitations and security issues.

2. For the third problem of the chicken rib problem, it is difficult for PaaS to have any whale users, mainly small and medium-sized enterprises, which have earned a small amount of money. However, due to competition, PaaS can't be sold much more expensive than IaaS, so survival is destined to be difficult.

The above points can be verified by data. There is a recent article on the English website Smashing boxes that compares Heroku and AWS; the conclusion is that the resources available for $57 on AWS are $75 or more on Heroku, which is more than a quarter.

article author is a user of both platforms, his final advice is:

& ldquo; Heroku applications on small, large application on AWS. ”

So why do you now flock to IaaS, and how many PaaS do you have? In last week's Beihang Cloud Computing Open Class, the author found an opportunity to raise this question to several guests on the stage. The answer from Ms. Li Yanbing, President of VMware China, hit the corner:

“IaaS, everyone knows How to make money; and to do PaaS, everyone still does not know how to make money. ”

The flaws of the service provider are not difficult to understand. Take Google as an example. Since the birth of GAE in 2008, it has been a fire for a while, but then the voice is getting smaller and smaller, so that everyone began to wonder if GAE has become a cold palace after Larry Page returns. One of the product lines. ? Earlier this month, the official blog published on EclipseSource an article entitled & ldquo; Does Google App Engine still matter & rdquo; articles:

article to the effect that, GAE in the industry & ldquo; News ” Still staying in 2010, the media and users' attention is not warm, so the Eclipse RAP project team intends to only support JBoss, Geronimo and Glassfish, while considering the weight of OpenShift, while the weight of GAE is reduced.

Where is PaaS's way out?

future, not necessarily dark

& ldquo; mobile Internet era will be the era of the developer. ” ——Li Yanhong, 2012 Baidu Developer Conference

Since entering the mobile Internet era, a clear trend in the industry is that developers have become the target of many companies. In addition to the company's heavy recruitment of developers, a variety of app stores, open platforms, have also thrown olive branches to senior, young, male and female developers.

So, PaaS is positioned as a developer service, and its value potential is enormously difficult to estimate. The downturn at the start, maybe it's just not the time.

So what do developers need?

& ldquo; Our first goal: to help developers save money; our second goal: to help developers make money. ”

When chatting with SAE's product manager, Chen Lijie (@easy), easy defined SAE's goals in this way.

To save money, PaaS is a bit weak in front of IaaS, but it depends on the scene. The birth of SAE and the development of Sina Weibo have a time of coincidence, starting from the positioning of internal support in the overall Sina strategy. The microblog application platform is characterized by a large number of small applications that are in line with the characteristics of PaaS. As of press time, the number of applications hosted on SAE has exceeded 320,000 (the number comes from its official website), and the number of developers is around 200,000.

According to easy, since the beginning of 2012, SAE's PV has surpassed GAE, with hundreds of millions more per day. Among several public cloud services in China, SAE has also gained a lot of recognition in the developer community. For example, Feng Dahui (@fenng) has positioned SAE on Weibo as “the best PaaS platform in China”. ”. From the perspective of product development and pre-operational operations, SAE's performance has been quite good.

However, with these alone, it is impossible to overcome the pain of PaaS itself. Behind the popularity of the current SAE, there are countless sent-outs "Yundou" as a support (Note: Yundou is the virtual currency used to exchange various computing resources on the SAE platform); and easy himself also said that SAE is actually Sina is losing money.

2012 is an important year for SAE to break away from this dilemma. The key to this is to help developers make money.

Globally, helping developers make money There are two of the most successful cases in this area: Facebook, and Apple's App Store.

In the domestic scope, although the open platform and the application store still can't get rid of the fate of the crack and the cottage, but after all, it is better than nothing.

Since 2011, SAE has made a number of attempts, including:

Mobile Cloud Platform: Developers can directly use the PhoneGap or AppCan integrated on SAE for iOS or Android application development. , debugging, and support for direct packaging and development of Android applications for apk.

Application Warehouse: For users, you can implement one-click installation of some systems, such as WordPress, Xweibo, development framework, etc. For developers, you can apply for developer identity to get free Yundou's reward.

Third-party service access: For enterprise users, the function is to distribute, track, monitor, and charge access APIs, and SAE draws 20% of the cost.

Sina Cloud Store: For users who don't understand technology, it is actually an upgraded version of the application warehouse, which changes in the way of operation.

Although not all of them are optimistic, there are already some positive trends. At the same time, SAE is also starting to make some reverse attempts:

Do IaaS.

Just two days ago, SAE announced that it will cooperate with micro-games to provide developers with cloud hosting services.

Moving from PaaS to IaaS is an interesting change. Although the technical content of IaaS is lower than that of PaaS, the profit margin is also low. However, because the overall demand is large, the corresponding transaction amount is also large, and the consumption of hardware resources is also increased a lot. Neither is Sina's strategic level support, SAE is currently able to apply for hardware resources will not be very plentiful, so this IaaS service is currently only for a few micro-games of large customers, has not yet opened to the outside world. However, the development of both PaaS and IaaS will be very interesting.

Another direction

If SAE is in the consumer sector of Facebook and the App Store, then VMware's Cloud Foundry and Red Hat's OpenShift represent another direction for PaaS. Both are giants in the enterprise IT services arena, VMware is the leader in enterprise virtualization and private cloud, and Red Hat is the representative of open source enterprise IT services.

Interestingly, Cloud Foundry from non-open source vendors has been open sourced since 2011, a year earlier than OpenShift from open source companies, which makes Cloud Foundry a big advantage.

If the development direction of SAE is to help developers make money, then the value of Cloud Foundry and OpenShift is to improve the productivity of software R&D companies. For example, Baidu does BAE. From the beginning, the main purpose is still to develop, deploy, test and launch its internal projects. If there are Cloud Foundry or OpenShift in 2009, maybe Baidu will not have to develop a PaaS system by itself.

As for commercialization, the two have not yet gone far, but the range of options is not large. In the enterprise-level IT field, IBM sells service routes and Oracle sells its all-in-one route. The open source PaaS itself is a value-added service. In fact, it is sold to the user, and the underlying hardware, software license, and upper-level services are always removed.

Conclusion

Regardless of the direction, PaaS's journey is actually a pursuit: from IaaS, which focuses on low-cost, cost-saving, high-end requirements for value-added services. development of. Technology wants more creative things, and PaaS provides such a platform.

Copyright © Windows knowledge All Rights Reserved