What is the current state of PaaS adoption? While enterprise interest in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is growing and many organizations are planning implementations, actual data indicates that total active deployments on major platforms like Google AppEngine and Heroku remain surprisingly low, demonstrating that PaaS has not yet achieved mass market dominance.
Last week we surveyed users about enterprise PaaS adoption plans, prompted by RedMonk analyst Michael Coté's question, whether you were adopting or wanted to adopt a platform-as-a-service. The majority of you are either already using one or more or are planning to start transitioning to the cloud.
But according to the enterprise cloud adoption data Coté has assembled, PaaS isn't a home run success quite yet.
Analyzing the PaaS Job Market and Application Deployments
According to Coté, it's difficult to track any hard numbers down regarding actual enterprise utilization. Most cloud vendors want to talk about applications deployed and registered developer accounts, not about paying customers. Coté says the total number of applications deployed on major platforms including Google AppEngine, Force.com, and Heroku is fewer than 300,000. "Which, is a big number, sure," he writes. "But how many applications are there in the world?"
But this is still an early space for cloud infrastructure development. As we pointed out earlier, Gartner is seeing an increased number of inquiries regarding Platform-as-a-Service solutions, and as you can see from the trends above, the number of PaaS engineering jobs is growing steadily. So there does seem to be significant foundational interest within the enterprise IT sector, even if complete application migrations are taking longer than anticipated.
Frequently Asked Questions About Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
What is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)?
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides developers with a comprehensive environment to build, deploy, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure typically associated with software development and hosting.
Why is enterprise PaaS adoption seemingly slow?
Enterprise PaaS adoption often faces friction due to concerns over vendor lock-in, compliance requirements, legacy application migration complexities, and the difficulty of tracking tangible ROI compared to simple Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.
Which are the leading PaaS providers currently?
The prominent PaaS providers in the market include Google AppEngine, Salesforce's Force.com, Heroku, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk.