Nov
9
2009

Managed Dedicated Servers- Why they beat PaaS for developers

In the technology arena, the buzzwords and catchphrases come almost as fast as the technical advancements, and one of the latest phrases to join the club is PaaS, or Platform as a Service. Service oriented approaches are becoming more and more popular, and largely for good reason. In general this is positive. People don’t care about the specific things it takes to deliver a particular service or set of services- the care about the outcomes. The problem for many PaaS offerings is they fail to fully deliver on some of the most critical requirements.

In many ways, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Hardware as a Service (HaaS) products are easier to define and fulfill. SaaS, effectively application hosting, is common enough for things like e-mail and web site hosting, and the advent of cloud computing and a hyper-connected user base has made distributed applications more and more feasible and efficient. Google’s document editing and sharing applications are one good example of this.

HaaS takes that same ‘black box’ approach to the role of hardware in an IT deployment, commoditizing computer components and defining them as their deliverables. Hard drives become disk space, memory and processor chips become resource percentages. When you make photocopies at your local office supply store, that’s HaaS in action. The customer pays a small cost for the use of an expensive machine, in this case a photocopier.

Platform as a Service merges SaaS and HaaS approaches, and is intended to function in similar capacities to managed dedicated servers. In theory this is an attractive idea, giving developers low cost, flexible platforms for application development, testing, and deployments. In practice, PaaS offerings often fall short in the most important requirements.
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