Have you ever had a new business idea but hesitate to try it out due to
the risk related to the initial investment? If your business is related to
internet services, maybe PaaS can help you.
Perhaps the biggest promise of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the user's
ability to try new things out with minimum risk. Just take an instance, deploy your
code, and pay per use. If it's aint working as a business, then just quit it,
and you didn't lost much.
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| Snapshot of Bluemix service configuration panel. |
Let's take a closer look to some key aspects:
Pay per use
Do you know how many users you'll have on your new service? Seldom one
can predict that, and it makes ROI calculation difficult. How about having your
costs proportional to your user count. That means fixed production cost per
production volume.
Modern PaaS services like Bluemix offer innovative payment models. The
base charging unit of Bluemix is Gigabytehour (GBh), somewhat similar to
kiloWatthours (kWh) you're paing for the electricity. The analogy is obvious:
pay per use.
Focus on your code
You do not need to care about hardware, connectivity, or the software
platform. Just select the necessary middleware services you need, and put all your
energy on your application, which is the one who brings all the added value
after all. It's the service provided by your application which matters to your customers, not
the underlain infrastructure.
In traditional IaaS approach, you need someone capable of putting it all
together and setting it up, and someone to maintain it and keep things rolling.
With PaaS, it's all taken care on behalf of you. You only need to understand
your application details.
Instantly in service
Just a few clicks to select components and services you need, and you're ready
to deploy you code to production use. How about development then? Just use the same PaaS, but developed on your own sandbox. Once it's ready to publish, just deploy it to production by simple mouse click.
Maintenance free
If something is advertised as maintenance free, it usually means you
can't fix it. In case of PaaS, you do not need to fix it, as someone is
already doing that, and without you even notice it.
IBM wrote about my thoughts in their blog at Sept. 23rd, 2014 (in Finnish): Playground for developer - Early birds experiences
One can't avoid discussing about internet services without someone
asking for security. That will topic for a next postings.
