The Rise of Microservices in the PaaS World

May 26th, 2014 11:18pm by Alex Williams

Editor’s Note: Highlight — how microservices and Docker are influencing PaaS. — AW.

Alex Williams, founder of The New Stack, will participate in a Fireside Chat on May 29 with Jerry Chen of Greylock Ventures and Scott Yara of Pivotal. The event is at the Pivotal office in Palo Alto. Registration is now open.

What’s going on in the PaaS market? What is the impact of microservices and lightweight technologies such as Docker? In the second episode of The New Stack Analysts, we explored these questions, the impact of open source and the implications of the Oracle v. Google ruling.

Here’s the recording. For more, check out the Podcast section.

#2: The Rise of Microservices in the PaaS World

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Co-Hosts

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk joined us today after his keynote at Gluecon. Michael Cote of 451 Research could not make it but will be here for our next show.

Guest Sponsor

On behalf of Apprenda, CEO Sinclair Schuller joined us to discuss the current state of the PaaS market.

Guests

Jeff Lindsay, who developed the concepts behind Webhooks among a list of other accomplishments, recently joined DigitalOcean. At DigitalOcean he will continue developing Flynn, a platform for ops teams to provide developers with a way to power production, testing, and development.
Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale, the open source Google App Engine.

Discussion

How PaaS is evolving into internal services with a microservices infrastructure.
Portability is now a hallmark of PaaS platforms.
What does PaaS exist for?
Open source is less important for the PaaS market — the real issue is APIS and how to foster interoperability.
Freedom and independence are more important. Lock-in is a customer’s primary concern.
PaaS is not just about apps: it’s now about composability.
How Flynn is composable oriented. PaaS can be broken down with each problem analyzed independently.
With microservices, a PaaS can be composed in the manner that fits the needs of the individuals.
You can’t build a backend with Heroku.
PaaS will reach its full potential when it is fully commoditized.
Your SLA is the lowest common denominator of the host you are building on.
A PaaS is composed of its APIs but is limited by how well they can be used.
Open source is not just about the code but the implicit promises that come with the APIs.
The Oracle v. Google ruling will not really matter as it is impractical for the company to play out a litigation strategy. The real issue in the ruling is about fair use.
Developers are concerned about the potential outcomes. It is frustrating that user interfaces can be protected by copyright. It is like saying the protocol should be protected.
Top-down strategies are a meaningful way to approach the PaaS market. Private PaaS environments can integrate with legacy technologies in ways that a public PaaS like Heroku can’t.
Exciting: A lot of the core ideas in PaaS will be commoditized into the infrastructure of the Internet.
Docker gives a perspective on how to reach beyond the traditional users of PaaS and into other communities.
The Docker technology is the model of a primitive. It is the architecture for primitives in a PaaS.

Our next show is tomorrow at 11 a.m. PDT. We’ll stream it live. The topic: DevOps and Composable Infrastructure. Hope to see you there.

Apprenda and DigitalOcean are sponsors of The New Stack.

Feature photo via Creative Commons

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the...