The PaaS stack players ( e . g ., Pivotal , CloudFoundry and Red Hat , Apprenda , OpenShift , etc .) will dismiss the DIY PaaS concept . They love to use the image at the beginning of this article to ask why anyone roll their own PaaS when you get a solution from them out of the box .
The picture does present a compelling argument , but what if the company doesn ’ t want to lay bricks in a straight line ? What if they ’ re required to build something really complex , with unique requirements that aren ’ t met out of the box by PaaS providers ? That ’ s very often the case in large enterprises , which is why they ’ re very intrigued with using Docker to build their own containers as a service solution .
Many companies are experimenting now with Docker containers to build their own PaaS . Docker is aggressively addressing their gaps in areas like security , orchestration , network and storage layer abstraction and others . So , with every release of Docker , the DIY PaaS story becomes more compelling .
Another factor that is playing a part in the decision making is that a lot of companies are declaring that they are “ all in ” when it comes to the public cloud . Companies like Capital One and General Electric have made very strategic bets on the public cloud and are greatly reducing their data center footprint over the next several years . Many of these same companies will likely look at the PaaS offerings that their IaaS providers have developed , rather than go down the private PaaS road .
The reality here is that both pure play private PaaS solutions and public cloud providers are gaining lots of PaaS customers . But keep an eye on Docker . There ’ s a good chance they ’ ll claim a large number of PaaS workloads in the near future , as their portfolio grows and matures .
What is driving PaaS demand ?
When enterprises first enter the cloud , they usually approach it from an infrastructure mindset . Putting SaaS aside , most enterprises pick an IaaS provider , either public or private , and then spend a good 2 to 3 years or more learning and maturing , as they implement their first few iterations of cloud solutions . Eventually , they get fairly good at IaaS and then start looking for ways to get even more agile . That ’ s when they start taking PaaS seriously as the way to reach the ultimate level of agility . What we ’ re seeing now is that many enterprises have been through those early years and have now become cloud competent .
These enterprises understand the value of PaaS and are becoming more interested in it than in previous years , as they seek to increase innovation and reduce time to market . This is why you ’ re seeing the Pivotals of the world doing so well . The demand is finally here - and it ’ s only going to increase .
Who is going to win ?
That ’ s the million dollar question . For the next 2 to 3 years , there ’ s going to be a lot of winning by a lot of different companies . Pivotal is killing it in the private PaaS area . The Big 3 public cloud providers are killing it as well , although AWS is gaining way more PaaS workloads than Microsoft and Google right now . Docker is set to explode in this area over the next couple of years . I predict that we ’ ll see more consolidation in the PaaS pure play area and more pivots . Last year we saw CloudBees pivot from a PaaS pure play to a Jenkins as a Service offering . Stackato was acquired by HP . Pivotal , Docker , Microsoft , IBM and others are gobbling up smaller companies to beef up their portfolios . There will be a lot more of this activity in 2016 and beyond .
Summary
PaaS adoption is on the rise for 2016 . The choices are many and there is enough demand for multiple vendors to do extremely well this year . With the surge in public cloud adoption and the emergence of containers , it will be very interesting to discover who the winners will be 3 to 5 years down the road . Expect to see more consolidation and more PaaS vendors pivoting . It will be hard for the smaller players to compete with the money that Pivotal , Docker and the Big 3 IaaS providers have . We have already seen many IaaS vendors pivot and we will see the same with the PaaS vendors this year . It should be fun to watch .
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