Why IaaS Won't Happen At Most Enterprises - InformationWeek

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Commentary
2/5/2014
09:06 AM
Jonathan Feldman
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Why IaaS Won't Happen At Most Enterprises

When enterprise infrastructure gurus say no to progress, business people will find a way around the roadblock. At many companies, this way will be PaaS.

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Stratustician
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Stratustician,
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2/5/2014 | 12:54:48 PM
Behold the Power of PaaS!
I love the distinction that DevOps, while as wonderful an idea as it seems, is really not going to be the trick for business transformation. You've called it out, it will be PaaS.  As the infrastructure guys start to grumble about the legacy gear, no matter how wonderful the vendors make on-premise equipment seem, everyone is going to start noodling the idea of going with PaaS and get rid of the complexity.  Why deal with all the headaches from staffing, maintenance to patching and support?  Remove all this from the equation, and just start devloping or transitioning legacy applications to managed environments (well, in this case semi-managed as much as PaaS can get).  Simplify!
WKash
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WKash,
 User Rank: Author
2/5/2014 | 3:28:41 PM
Re: Behold the Power of PaaS!
Jonathan, thanks for discerning why the forces of nature -- or at least IT shops -- are likely to make this true.  Interestingly, in the federal govt. space, there's all the same resistance to move to IaaS, and were it not for the "Cloud First" initiative, we'd probably still just be talking about IaaS.  Instead, we now have a dozen IaaS cloud services FedRAMP-(security) certified, and just recently, the first PaaS service certified.  IaaS seems ideal for startups and enterprise business owners who want to start sometihng new, but have to get in line with other projects with their IT folks. But I think you're right, the real demand for those who want to grow their business -- or improve govt. services -- is for help at the PaaS level.

 
Drew Conry-Murray
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Drew Conry-Murray,
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2/6/2014 | 10:07:04 AM
Re: Behold the Power of PaaS!
This is a strong justification for PaaS. Now we have to see if developers take to it in signficant numbers.
cbabcock
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cbabcock,
 User Rank: Strategist
2/5/2014 | 2:35:46 PM
PaaS bypasses IaaS? Or containers reduce their differences?
A very well throught out and well said column, Jonathan. DevOps is a goal, an ideal, one that remains a difficult and distrant one in too many cases. I was also impressed by your statement, "PaaS abstracts all of the insfrastructure... and focues on the notion of a 'container.'" I haven't seen containerization in quite this light myself.It seems to me containers work well as a bulding block in PaaS. They work well as a deployment mechanism to IaaS, with developer or admin. decisions already resolved by the configuration in the container. Containerization reduces the differences between PaaS and Iaas, which were somewhat arbitrary to begin with.   
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