There is now a huge amount of movement in the area of what we have called “Diverse” Platform as a Service i.e. PaaS that delivers a number of different application infrastructure technologies on a mix-and-match basis and where there is no proprietary technology layer at any point in the platform stack. Amongst these we would include OpenShift, Cumulogic and CloudFoundry from our recent set of posts. AppFog sits in this category, and the fact that it has been recently renamed from PHPFog highlights a major trend in the space, the vendors typically start by developing a single technology, build an initial business plan and gain some market traction within that niche, and then move on to supporting a broader range of platforms.
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Secret Shopper Report – VMware CloudFoundry
To recap the story so far, I’m prototyping an application and deploying it to various PAAS environments. I am not getting any special help from any of the vendors in this exercise – you can think of me as a “secret shopper” for PaaS, although I don’t hide my identity. I am approaching each platform on its own merits, and in these posts I am recounting and contrasting my experiences and reaching some general conclusions about the PaaS market.
Cumulogic Launches Highly Diverse PaaS Cloud
Over the last few months we have identified a trend towards “diversity” in the PaaS provider marketplace. Platform as a Service has become Platforms as a Service, the providers are offering multiple choices at each layer of the platform infrastructure, and seeing their role as automating the provisioning of properly-configured instances as required at each layer of the stack.
On Aug 2nd, there was another entrant to this “diverse” PaaS provider marketplace called Cumulogic, a startup with a PaaS cloud positioned alongside Red Hat OpenShift and VMware CloudFoundry that we identified earlier.
PaaS Platform experience – Red Hat OpenShift
As mentioned in a couple of recent posts, I have been building a prototype application using Open Source technologies that I plan to install on a number of available PaaS cloud platforms. The application is written in Groovy (with some bits in Java) and built on the Grails framework. This article is about my use of RedHat OpenShift PaaS and the controls available.
Improving PaaS Security: Get your Developers Involved
The 6/16 Virtualization Security Podcast started as a twitter conversation with a comment about PaaS Security where James Urquhart, Krishnan Subramanian, Rich Miller, and myself went back and forth about PaaS security and the role of the developer. It was not quite a DevOps conversation but pretty close. Rich could not join us on this Podcast but hopefully will make a future one. PaaS security appears to be dependent on two things, the provider’s security, and how it is used.
VMware’s SpringSource Ecosystem
As mentioned in my previous piece I’ve been doing some prototyping using SpringSource’s Grails. Grails can be thought of as the top of the stack. If you pick up Grails you would naturally pull in the other pieces of SpringSource, including vFabric and ultimately vFoundry. In a future post I will deal with what happens when you stick Grails onto vFoundry, but at this stage I’ve been assessing the health of the SpringSource Ecosystem.