Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

PaaS: Assembly versus Fabrication

PaaS can be thought of as SaaS for developers. It is software delivered as a service that enables the construction of other software.

One key benefit of PaaS is inherent in the value of components and platforms. We might call this the peanut butter sandwich principle: It’s easier to make a peanut butter sandwich if you don’t have to grow and grind your own peanuts, grow your own wheat, and bake your own bread. Leveraging proven, tested, components that others have created can be faster than building them from scratch.

It is difficult to ascribe this benefit to the PaaS model alone, because it was the promise of service-oriented architectures (SOA) with reusable catalogs of components.

However, according to Peter Coffee, the biggest issue with SOA is the lack of a WIIFM—a “what’s in it for me.”9 There is little to motivate an internal developer to create reusable components. In the platform world, however, the motivation is money: the creation of a component that will enter a publicly available library and be sold. It is like the difference, Coffee observed, between trying to get a teen to clean his or her room versus paying Merry Maids to do it. Profit is a strong motivator and unleashes the power of a competitive market.