No mention of App Engine, Elastic Beanstalk, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry, Parse, Firebase. The only company I recognize from that list is Heroku.<p>If you do not even talk about market leaders in a space, you're almost guaranteed to form an inaccurate opinion.<p>That said, if the point he is trying to make that newcomers aren't there or aren't innovating, that's wrong too. PaaS is not moving at the slow rate that traditional hosting went through. So the term Gartner defines goes out of date before they publish their reports. There has been plenty innovation by Parse, Firebase, Compose, Mongo in 2015. IBM Bluemix came to the scene with great modularity and Watson as a service. Google brought in a bunch of new stuff too. Docker didn't kill PaaS, that's like saying LAN wires killed servers. It just pushed the level of abstraction in PaaS a bit higher. Being able to throw code and being able to run it without thinking of hardware is a very 2014 problem for most people. The sex is in what's coming next. PaaS has evolved.
We run applications for dozens of clients across several different language stacks on Heroku. Our entire (rapidly expanding) business depends on it. If we had to maintain those instances ourselves, it would require a full time dev ops employee, if not multiple. We've side-stepped the requirement for any dedicated devops staff by relying on Heroku's automation for this. So I really do not see how PaaS is even remotely close to dead. Those companies probably don't release glitzy PR bragging about their success (like most VC-funded companies trying to generate hype) because they don't need to - the money just keeps rolling in. If I start seeing PaaS companies vanishing inexplicably then I'll start to wonder.
A look at the PaaS landscape that doesn't mention AWS (Elastic Beanstalk) or Azure is a very weird look.<p>Why is it getting harder for randos to succeed in PaaS? Because they're competing with Amazon and Microsoft, and that's hard.
I disagree, I think PaaS is in its infancy and will grow not die. One PaaS not mentioned in the article, Microsoft Azure, is growing fast and provides a vast range of services.<p>We run an enterprise grade SaaS product on PaaS, and I personally have several apps running on PaaS. These solutions would have taken much longer to get to market without PaaS and be much more complex to manage and maintain.
PaaS is not dead and it is not going anywhere.<p>We use Azure's PaaS features known as Cloud Services and App Services (a.k.a. Azure websites/web apps). They make deploying and scaling your app as easy as it could ever be. The App Service plans also allow you to combine multiple apps together on a group of servers which enables you to save a lot of money if you have a lot of small applications.<p>Now of course I could use a bunch of automation and do this all myself with VMs... but why? Just use Azure, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, etc.
Wow I never knew the Nodejitsu guys became part of Godaddy:<p>"Nodejitsu has joined GoDaddy
We are excited to join GoDaddy to help spearhead their largest Node.js product: Website Builder."<p>That has got to be the saddest acquisition I've ever heard.
I think it's safe to invoke Betteridge's Law here.<p>Anyone working in this space can tell you that's still the age-old discussion: Wether it was mainframes vs. microcomputers, containers vs. VM's, microservices vs. monolithic applications. Sometimes a particular architecture was preferred, sometimes the other. And none have gone away for good, and none have taken up the market completely. Essentially, the answer depends on your requirements (And the world just isn't binary).<p>The only thing that's for sure is that distributed systems are here to stay – but how you call the various abstraction layers forming them up really doesn't matter. All that really changes (currently) is the size of the market, or the shares therein.<p>Some of you might remember that we did the 'cloud' before it was called as such, and while the terms I/P/SaaS weren't known under this moniker, it was already in use.
I think the Docker based self-hosted PAASs (Deis, Flynn etc) is squeezing the smaller PAAS offering at the low end, and Elastic Beanstalk/Azure/Google CloudDB is killing it at the high end.<p>Why would you use <insert random small PAAS company> when you can deploy your own on AWS and then use their managed DB service?
I think PaaS demand is going to die down in the near future. The simple reason is that before, it used to be quite annoying to get a server set up, replicate it and scale it, but now with all the awesome automation tools coming out, I doubt that is going to be a problem anymore.<p>Nonetheless, I doubt PaaSes will disappear, they will still remain useful for hobby projects as you can see with this quote:<p><pre><code> The free usage got less attractive,
paid hobbyist usage got more attractive.
I find it notable that the hobby-pricing-level is
competitive with DigitalOcean.</code></pre>
> PaaS is a black-box; it's proprietary; it's a beautiful island; it's not as versatile as a home-grown solution. Developers love the freedom of root access, they want to able install any open-source software they like. While PaaS is offering well defined and thoughtful solutions.<p>Wow, there's a lot of fancy talk to avoid the phrase "vendor lock-in" here.
I am a paying Heroku customer and I used to use AppEngine a fair mount. I would argue that both of these PaaS are doing well. I don't think the article even mentioned AppEngine.
I cannot imagine how many startups would have failed to successfully launch (as they had) if it wasn't for the ease-of-use of hosting their platform, such as Heroku. I know that early on I wouldn't have had the patience/confidence to roll my own stack on a node, let alone trust its integrity.
This got passed around at work.<p>The problems are:<p>1. PaaS is such a good idea that everyone is building their own. Even though the field has matured -- Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are already available and supported by major vendors.<p>2. The author cherrypicked a selection of failed small vendors as the marker of the trend. By this logic every single technological advance of the past 100 years is dead.<p>Meanwhile, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has the fastest-growing sales of any opensource product in history.<p>What I agree with:<p>PaaSes don't get love from techies because we like to tinker. We always assume we can do better. We often can, and for special cases PaaSes may not be suitable.<p>But large organisations with heterogenous teams and apps, PaaSes are godsend.<p>Disclaimer: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry.
Was PaaS ever alive?<p>Technically that stuff works yes.<p>As much as driver service on demand exists for people who don't want to own a car or learn how to drive it and do not want to walk, use a bike and don't care about parking space.<p>As long as investors are over investing. It is living on perfusion.<p>I mean PaaS as a business?<p>PaaS/IaaS is overly ridiculously expensive for competent team. It is usable for companies who do not care about the OPEX... the costs of resources ... the costs of not hiring competent dev/sysadmins.<p>We are in recession, the source of investments is gonna run dry, so I guess it is time to see PaaS users' slowly bankrupt while the cheap competitors will survive.<p>Business is a harsh world for those who do not care about costs and prices.
Part of the challenge is that PasS platforms have quite a bit of vendor lock in.<p>I can foresee the growth of do-it-yourself PaaS, built on Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
Article author here. Thanks for all the feedback. Many of you missed the big players like Azure, AWS (Lambda & Elastic Beanstalk), Google App Engine … Well, that's true.<p>Due to my perspective I am mostly interested in the "bootstrapability" of the business model here: What are our companions are doing?
I'm a user of Heroku, and I went in with the idea that the add ins (DBs, notification, logging, etc.) offerings would be super easy to use and compelling to stay in the eco system. They are super easy to use, but I learned that so are their competitors, and they don't integrate into Heroku in a compelling way. I ended up with a DBaaS that was miles more expensive than the AWS competitor that I will switch to when I get a chance. The base Heroku service, while not super cheap is one of the few pieces of my puzzle that may not change. AWS EB is probably better than the Heroku dynos, but not so much that it's on my short list of things to do.
In terms of market cap, how do Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine, and Azure compare with Heroku? Can we really make a claim on the PaaS landscape without talking about some of the biggest players?<p>I'd be very curious to know how the 4 mentioned services are doing.
It depends.<p>It's getting easier to assemble scalable we application out of IaaS offerings. OTOH, writing against, say, Google App Engine is not as simple as writing for Django or Flask. It's, however, educational.