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Platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, is an
increasingly popular cloud offering
that enables developers and IT
operations professionals to build and
maintain applications while avoiding
many infrastructure-related challenges
and expenses. According to a 2014
IDC report, the global PaaS market is
expected to reach $20.3 billion in 2018
as enterprises continue to adopt this
new technology.
Playing on “PaaS,” Gartner coined the
term xPaaS in 2013 to describe the broad
spectrum of specialized middleware
products that IT vendors offer as
services, like integration Platform-
as-a-service (iPaaS) or business
process management Platform-as-a-
service (bpmPaaS). xPaaS seizes the
opportunity cloud computing provides
to reimagine application development
and operations, making these processes
faster, easier, less risky, and more
flexible.
Middleware meeting the cloud has
facilitated the DevOps movement
and predictably transformed how
developers create applications and IT
operations professionals manage them.
But enterprise IT is only starting to
experience the xPaaS revolution's most
surprising and exciting consequence
as line of business managers become
more closely involved in the software
development process than ever before.
The rise of "BizDevOps" is leading not
only to tighter collaboration between IT
departments and business managers,
but also to heightened expectations,
with businesses increasingly relying
on technology to carve out unique
competitive advantages.
Accelerating time to market
Onemajor benefit of xPaaS is accelerating
applications' time to market. Innovation
demands the ability to experiment, fail
fast, and deliver before the competition.
Developers must be free to focus on
their applications, unhampered by
the need to provision, configure, and
secure their application infrastructure.
IT operations can't take on even
more maintenance responsibilities,
especially when many stacks deployed
for the sake of rapid innovation may be
extremely short lived. Architects need to
provide an environment that maximizes
productivity, minimizes cost and risk,
and scales rapidly and securely.
The last generation of application
platforms, integration buses, and
process automation suites, while an
improvement over earlier home-grown
solutions, fell short of delivering critical
functionality
on-demand
without
the need to acquire, provision, and
maintain application infrastructure.
xPaaS automates tedious tasks like
setup, configuration, and integration.
Traditionally, developers performed
each of these functions for each
middleware product manually—a time-
consuming, error-prone process. To
communicate with the database, for
example, developers needed to obtain a
connection string in one place and input
it into a configuration file somewhere
else. With xPaaS, intuitive menus help
developers select their database and get
their systems up and running quickly.
The xPaaS Revolution and the Rise of
BizDevOps
Mike Piech, Red Hat
62 l New-Tech Magazine Europe