back to article Docker death blow to PaaS? The fat lady isn’t singing just yet folks

Logically nestled just above Infrastructure-as-a-Service and just beneath the Software-as-a-Service applications it seeks to support, we find Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). As you would hope from any notion of a platform, PaaS comes with all the operating system, middleware, storage and networking intelligence we would want — …

  1. Lusty

    PaaS

    I get the feeling you don't understand what PaaS is. Containers can be used to provide IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions, the difference is which components the vendor manages and which components the customer manages, and these have literally nothing to do with the virtualisation layer. O365 is SaaS because you buy a mailbox, Web Apps are PaaS because you get a web server where MS manages the IIS instance as well as the OS, VMs are usually IaaS because after initial deployment you manage everything other than the virtualisation layer. Docker, VMware, Xen are all irrelevant to this conversation and vice versa.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Isn't app seperation what the OS was for in the first place?

  3. h4rm0ny
    Paris Hilton

    This is kind of an odd article. I'm not sure if my understanding is at fault or the author's. I don't quite see the overlap / conflict between Docker and PaaS that the author seems to be talking about, but I may just not quite have got what they mean.

    The point of PaaS to me is that I have someone else providing the services that I need and these people (Amazon, Azure et al.) are going to know a lot more about managing it all than I do. Or quite frankly even if they don't, I want to focus on my applications, not on administration of all these services.

    That's why PaaS is my GoTo. IaaS is my fallback if PaaS can't do what I need because with IaaS I can do a lot more, but at a very marked increase in work outside my core business. As PaaS gets better and better, I see the need for IaaS reducing for my use cases (and many people's). I think there will be a big shift away from IaaS towards PaaS because if the latter gives you what you need and lets you focus on what you really care about, why wouldn't you?

    But where Containerisation fits into the above conversation, I'm not quite sure. I think the author is saying that Containerisation obviates the need for PaaS to some extent? Or that people think it does and he's saying that actually people are wrong and it doesn't... But I'm not quite clear. Containerization is, I guess you could call it, a refinement / supplement / tool for IaaS and thus keeps parity between the two approaches, offsetting the complexity of IaaS to some extent? I'm not sure if that's the argument.

    Paris, because maybe I'm just being like her today.

  4. IGnatius T Foobar

    Containers have been around for more than a decade

    The article says that containers have been around for a decade. It's been way longer than that. Smart unix admins have been running applications in chroot jails for at least twice that long.

  5. Simon Harris

    Oh... it's Platform as a Service.

    From the illustration, I'd assumed it was Piggy as a Service!

  6. K

    I think the author is saying is a roundabout way that people choose PaaS for the low maintenance and small footprint, where containers provide much the same but at an OS level.

    Not the biggest lover of PaaS myself because of the lock-in, but I think the article is comparing 2 different stack layers. Like comparing a Layer 2 switch with a Layer 3 router..

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SmartOS

    check out SmartOS / Joyent for a 'singular' perspective.

  8. RaidOne

    Am I the only one thinking that Docker died, and that's a blow to PaaS, after reading the title?

    Like "Docker death - blow to PaaS" instead of "Docker - death blow to PaaS"?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Confused

    I'm not sure what the article is trying to tell me. In the case of Google (the only example I'm familiar with), their PaaS *is* containers (okay, not Docker, but other container technologies are available). Their IaaS *is* containers too. Containers are not an alternative to PaaS, their an enabler for it. If the PaaS is too much of a walled garden, fine, roll your own containers. It's all about choice.

    My company currently runs mostly on PaaS but will likely use some container services too. Underneath, it's all containers anyway.

    1. h4rm0ny

      Re: Confused

      I think I have seen the future, and it's Containers all the way down.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Weird article

    Agree that the author does not seem to 'get' PAAS. The people lunging for docker etc will be the people in IT who become irrelevant when the world moves from IAAS to PAAS.

  11. F0ul

    Docker and PaaS have a place in the future, but its not the same space, and maybe that is what's confusing the author. Yet again, the simple minded media believe in a zero sum future, where what docker actually offers is a kind of private PaaS.

    The whole point of the way technology moves forward is that we get better tools for our individual roles. Its not about everybody stopping to use one technology, and starting to use another for the same solution. Personally I think there is a place for an embedded OS running Docker and using PaaS to store its data.

    Or is that IoT, and suddenly IaaS is out of date?!

  12. Jesper Frimann

    CaaS

    Well the problem for the author is that there really isn't as one to one mapping between containers and the 'as a service' abbreviations.

    There is a rather big gap between the lower part in the technology stack of Paas and the higher parts of the solution stack of Saas.

    That is why, I normally internally where I work (I am an enterprise architect at an outsourcing provider) use the terms CaaS (Container as a Service) DBasS (Database as a Service) and MaaS (Middleware as a Service) and put those ontop PaaS and Below SaaS. That kind of makes things a bit easier.

    // Jesper

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