Everyone has a unique way of looking at things, or so the saying goes. Technology is an opinionated space, more so when it comes to building abstractions and platforms. This article takes the reader on a journey of over a decade where software developers are coming to terms with platforms for building, deploying, and operating applications.
A Brief History of the PaaS Paradigm
The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) paradigm has revolutionized software development, offering a fertile ground for innovation without the burden of infrastructure management. The story begins in the early 2010s with pioneers like Heroku, deis, and Cloud Foundry. These early platforms offered developers a glimpse into a future where they could focus solely on app development. The platform took care of the underlying infrastructure. Heroku pioneered this form of democratized application deployment. Cloud Foundry (backed by Pivotal) emerged as an enterprise leader in the PaaS space thanks to its feature parity, open-source, and community-driven option.
Following this initial wave, platforms like Dokku, inspired by Heroku, emerged as lightweight, self-hosted alternatives. Meanwhile, OpenShift, initially developed by Red Hat, carved its niche in the enterprise space. It offered a container-centric approach to application deployment and management.
As cloud computing matured, PaaS solutions embraced the concept of cloud-native development to deliver greater scalability, portability, and efficiency. Today, major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform offer robust PaaS offerings, integrating seamlessly with their broader cloud ecosystems.
How has the Emergence of Docker Changed Things?
The emergence of Docker in the early 2010s revolutionized Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It introduced standardized containers for application packaging and deployment. Prior to Docker, PaaS offerings often relied on specific languages or frameworks, limiting developer flexibility.
Docker, however, enabled language-agnostic deployments. It allows developers to package their applications with all dependencies into a self-contained unit, fostering portability and consistency across diverse environments.
Docker’s origins are interesting! It began as an internal project within a company called dotCloud, a Platform-as-a-Service provider. Recognizing the immense potential of their containerization technology, dotCloud open-sourced it in 2013, giving birth to Docker. This revolutionized the software world, leading to widespread adoption of containers and a new era in cloud-based development.
This shift towards containerization empowered PaaS vendors to offer greater flexibility and scalability. Platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry integrated with Docker, allowing developers to deploy and manage containerized applications seamlessly. Additionally, Docker paved the way for cloud-native architectures where PaaS offerings leveraged container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes for automated deployment and management of complex applications at scale.
In essence, Docker’s impact on PaaS has been transformative. It has fostered a standardized, portable, and scalable approach to application development and deployment, solidifying PaaS as a cornerstone of modern software delivery.
How has Open Source Impacted PaaS?
Open source has impacted every sphere of software development, the PaaS landscape being no exception. The adoption of PaaS tools has seen significant transformation ― both in the enterprise and engineer-driven ways ― because of open source PaaS tools emerging to compete with other proprietary approaches. Open source has been forceful in transposing the opinionated nature of PaaS tools.
Open-source PaaS frameworks provide a transparent and collaborative environment for developers to contribute, share ideas, and improve functionality. This enabled faster adoption and helped secure buy-in from all kinds of stakeholders. These open-source PaaS solutions also offered cost-effective alternatives to proprietary platforms. This made a fluid developer experience accessible to startups, small teams, and organizations with budget constraints.
The open-source nature of certain PaaS tools also ensured a culture of interoperability with other tools. It was the open source PaaS tools that embraced the Docker wave when it emerged, and also the Kubernetes wave at present.
Did The Dawn of DevOps Change the PaaS Landscape?
Prior to DevOps, traditional software development often involved siloed operations that hindered agility and innovation. The emergence of DevOps principles, advocating for continuous integration and delivery pipelines and shared responsibility, paved the way for a more streamlined development process. This shift perfectly aligned with the core tenets of PaaS, which always aimed to streamline application deployment and the management of infrastructure.
Two areas emerged as particular areas of discord between PaaS tools and the DevOps movement. The idea of openness was extremely important to the DevOps movement. The opacity that PaaS tools sometimes introduced, along with (leaky) abstractions, caused turbulence. The nature of PaaS tools was to introduce abstractions to shape the developer experience. This went somewhat against the open paradigm held dearly by DevOps practitioners.
The second area where discordance was found was in security considerations. DevOps advocated comprehensive security feature sets to be made available to individual developers. The “Security Shifts Left” mantra describes the DevOps position perfectly. A specialized fork, namely DevSecOps, also took form where developers were in complete control of securing their applications. Within PaaS environments, it was impossible to expect this kind of transparency.
The Present State of PaaS Tools a.k.a. Platform Engineering
PaaS tools continue to positively impact software engineering teams. The rise of containers and now Kubernetes has introduced the need for several ways to streamline and homogenize the developer experience, which is a perennial use case for PaaS tools.
One interesting way in which PaaS tools are emerging as an excellent aide is in creating a navigable path within the CNCF landscape. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) landscape serves as a comprehensive map of the ever-expanding cloud-native ecosystem. As of today, it boasts an impressive 180 projects, encompassing various tools and technologies crucial for building, deploying, and managing modern cloud-native applications.
However, for software development teams looking for “a” way to configure ingress, a single path to using blobstore, or the simplest way to configure a load balancer, this can result in an overwhelming choice and immense cognitive overload. Here, PaaS tools can emerge as the answer to questions such as “Should I use Ingress or Envoy?”
The complexities associated with Kubernetes and Cloud Native technologies have given momentum to Platform Engineering to emerge as a mainstay within the Kubernetes ecosystem. Effectively, they created a demand for a simplified, streamlined, and collaborative approach to application development and deployment. Platform engineering emerged as a solution, bridging the gap between various technical aspects and allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of cloud-native technologies more effectively.
A Focus on Developer Experience
In recent years, there has been a strong focus on improving the developer experience. The main reason isn’t simply to keep developers happy. It’s been proven that improving developer experience enhances productivity and ultimately improves an organization’s profitability.
The term DevEx (Developer Experience) emerged as organizations looked for ways to make a modular platform available that covered infrastructure, services, and other tools along with knowledge bases and other peripherals. This also subsumes the present trend of Internal Developer Portals (IDP) which helps in converging developer resources for streamlining and collaboration ― resulting in productivity gains. A case in point is Backstage.
With the current economic climate leading organizations are looking to make the most out of their workforce. DevEx is a booming topic. Cloud Foundry led the way with its goal of providing a delightful developer experience where a single – almost magic command (cf push) – was the only thing they needed to deploy mission-critical apps.
To groom an organization’s DevEx, technology leaders constantly try to improve three critical metrics.
- Feedback loops, which is the time developers have to wait to get their work done.
- Cognitive load, which is how much mental energy developers need to put in to do their job.
- Flow state, which is the “in the zone” state that developers need to be in to do their best work.
This trend has further fueled the need for polished developer tools, and PaaS platforms are at the center of it.
What Does The Future Hold For PaaS?
The original problems that PaaS tools had set out to solve remain relevant in the wake of new paradigms arising and replacing old ones.
Within the Kubernetes and CNCF ecosystem, the future of PaaS is one of mutual inclusion and evolution, where both platforms coexist and adapt to meet developers’ ever-changing needs. This coexistence will be marked by two key trends: convergence with Kubernetes and specialization for specific use cases.
Convergence with Kubernetes will see major cloud providers ― like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ― further integrate managed Kubernetes services into their existing PaaS offerings. This will allow developers to leverage the familiar PaaS environment they’re accustomed to, while simultaneously benefitting from the power and flexibility of Kubernetes for container orchestration. Additionally, open-source PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift, which interoperate with Kubernetes as their core container orchestration engine, will further blur the lines between PaaS and Kubernetes.
Specialization within the PaaS landscape will see vendors cater to specific developer communities and industry needs. This specialization will allow PaaS vendors to address the unique challenges and requirements of diverse development teams.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is a non-profit open source organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard for delivering the best experience for developers at companies of all sizes. The Foundation projects include Cloud Foundry, Paketo Buildpacks, Korifi, BOSH, Open Service Broker API, CredHub, and more. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, and is used by more than half the Fortune 500, representing nearly $15 trillion in combined revenue. Cloud Foundry is hosted by The Linux Foundation and is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: http://www.cloudfoundry.org.
