Programming for PaaS

Chapter 9. The Future of PaaS

In the previous chapters, we began to look at what the future may hold for Platform-as-a-Service. PaaS will play an increasingly important role in app development as it matures through technological hurdles. Equally important to the future of PaaS, however, is the growth and influence of IaaS technology. The multitude of IaaS APIs can be confusing for a developer, but PaaS can offer a simpler worldview that lets developers get their work done faster.

The Influence of OpenStack

PaaS is often tied to Infrastructure-as-a-Service. The early PaaS companies, such as Heroku and EngineYard, used Amazon Web Services as their IaaS provider. As PaaS continued to evolve, an important technology shift occurred in IaaS. It all started from a simple question: what if Amazon Web Services technology was open source?

In July 2010, Rackspace and NASA jointly launched a new open source initiative known as OpenStack. The idea was to create the world’s first open source IaaS project. The first code contributions came from NASA’s Nebula platform (called Nova) and Rackspace’s Cloud Files platform (called Swift). The promise of OpenStack was enormous. If it could be built, theoretically anyone could run their own AWS-like service. Such a large promise turned out to be very hard to execute on. Early on, there were a lot of complaints about how immature the software was. However, it has matured quickly and is becoming more and more stable and feature rich every day.

OpenStack has ...