PaaS: Future with OpenStack

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is becoming hot trend in IT sector. Research by IDC claims that by 2017 public PaaS market will be $14 billion. They estimated compound growth of PaaS will be around 30%.

“By 2017, public PaaS will account for more than 10 per cent of overall application development and deployment revenue, with strong growth occurring in every region of the world, especially in Asia/Pacific (including Japan).”

PaaS with OpenStack

Currently PaaS functionality offered through OpenStack does not match with established PaaS provider like Cloudfoundry, Openshift etc. But OpenStack community is giving signal PaaS to be big in future on OpenStack. Currently orchestration engine Heat has capability to launch stack of choice with minimal effort. It has AWS Cloudformation compatibility. Heat can be a big tool for OpenStack PaaS. Anybody can either customize horizon or create a separate application to leverage Heat apis to launch development environment stack. It can be served as a minimal PaaS offerings.

A new project, named Solum, has been announced for PaaS. It is backed by leading cloud players. Solum will utilize various OpenStack components including Heat, Nova’s Docker, keystone, trove etc. Key goals of Solum are

  • Ease of application life cycle management
  • Continuous integration and continuous deployment with automated deployment
  • Application portability between public and private clouds

This seems taking openstack to another level of services. We can consider example of AWS which initially focus on low level of infrastructure services but recently announced PaaS service also.

How much of solum will get success depends on future but now it seems promising to provide PaaS with commercial level functionality.

The only thing is that OpenStack community should always welcome and encourage it’s integration with other PaaS providers. That will help vendors to add more business values to their OpenStack based services.