Central to the Government Community Cloud model is the development of a ‘Private PaaS’ (Platform as a Service).

Public Cloud providers like Azure offer a combination of hosting and built-in software components that make life easier and quicker for software developers, to write, maintain and publish new software to production environments.

Deploying this same combination internally is therefore a Private PaaS, and in my view this will be the real ‘killer app’ of the Cloud trend. This will be where the bulk of enterprise spending in the Cloud space will be concentrated, as large organizations like banks and governments leverage the power of the technology via the mode they feel most comfortable with.

In a nutshell where IaaS is about how virtualization enables a single hardware platform to run multiple OS instances, PaaS repeats the same effect for running multiple software applications on a single OS instance. Where virtualization amplifies the economic value of a hardware platform through running multiple OS, PaaS then expands that another dimension by enabling each OS to run multiple applications too.

DevOps – Maximizing the business benefits of Cloud Computing
This emphasizes how the value of PaaS is more about a new software layer and associated productivity benefits for developers, less so than it is about outsourcing to Cloud providers for elastic supply of IaaS, or similarly the deployment of internal IaaS.

The reality for most large enterprises is that the cost of hardware is the least expensive part of their challenge. They can and do throw lots of servers at projects because in relative terms it’s not that difficult or costly to do so.

In contrast the complexities of software development and deploying large enterprise applications is a hugely expensive activity, both in terms of labor, agility and change management, as well as financial cost. For example how rapidly they can implement new systems determines how quickly they can launch new products, which can directly impact market share and subsequently revenues and profits.

The Apprenda white paper highlights that PaaS can impact on this level of business ROI:

• Standardize application development and drive highly efficient software architecture, establishing conformity across all guest applications
• Increasing agility through automating critical DevOps workflows, reducing complexity and delegating control through self-service
• Dramatically boost developer productivity by reducing time-to-deploy new applications (eg from 30 days to 5 mins) through the PaaS handling common components like authentication, session management, caching etc.

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