buyers guide: enterprise platform as a service...
TRANSCRIPT
Buyers Guide: Enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS)Choosing Products to Enable Private PaaS
A P P R E N D A Guidance
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Context ................................................................................................................................................................................ 2
Summary .............................................................................................................................................................................. 2
What is Enterprise PaaS and How Does It Fit Into Cloud Strategies .................................................................................... 2
How does PaaS fit into the IT Ecosystem? ........................................................................................................................... 3
What is the business value of an Enterprise PaaS? ............................................................................................................... 4
Public PaaS vs. Enterprise PaaS ........................................................................................................................................... 4
Organization Best Practices ............................................................................................................................................ 5
CIO/CTOs .......................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Developers ........................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Chief Software Architects ................................................................................................................................................... 6
IT Administrators .................................................................................................................................................................. 7
External Influences – Initiatives Interacting with PaaS ......................................................................................................... 8
Proof of Concept ................................................................................................................................................................. 8
Scoring, RFP, and Evaluation Criteria .................................................................................................................................. 9
Summary of Information to Gather Prior to the Selection of an Enterprise PaaS ............................................. 9
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A P P R E N D A Guidance
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C O N T E X T
Introduces key concepts, business values and preparations necessary for acquiring and implementing an enterprise Platform as a Service tier.
S U M M A R Y
Individual lines of business want to leverage applications as a source of revenue and competitive advantage. Simultaneously, IT leaders find they need to deliver world-class services and an ecosystem where customers, employees, and partners can build, deploy, and monetize cloud services. Both the line of business and IT operations’ needs are addressed by new cloud software and services. However, with an array of options from public IaaS to private PaaS, organizations often find it difficult to discern where different cloud technologies fit. This document provides guidance on using private PaaS in an enterprise.
Private PaaS
D E V T E A M 1 D E V T E A M 2 D E V T E A M i
BUILT & DEPLOYED BY DEV TEAMS
MANAGED BY CENTRAL IT
AGGREGATES & ABSTRACTS AWAY FROM APPS
App 1 App 2 App 3 App n
Infrastructure (VMs, Raw Metal, Load Balancers)
What is Enterprise PaaS and How Does It Fit Into Cloud StrategiesEnterprise PaaS acts like a single application server and has built-in functionality for the cloud era. It pools various infrastructure resources together and exposes them to developers through a self-service interface. The PaaS will have middleware components—such as high availability, scalability, load balancing, and multi-tenancy—to decrease the development time for an application.
PaaS uses light weight containers to provide a level of isolation, reduced resource usage, and better scalability. A container is similar to a virtual machine, but does not require a separate guest operating system. Other resources, such as database servers and network components, can also be managed to varying degrees by the platform to automate provisioning and connectivity activities.
The PaaS is application-centric and stands up the configuration of the application to reduce the complexity of DevOps and IT automation. Enterprise private PaaS is maintained by central IT and may include both private data centers and public IaaS.
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Enterprise PaaS is known by various names. Some analyst firms like to make a distinction between the software or development involved to enable a PaaS and the actual service itself. They will also use PaaS to describe many different services that are not aimed at custom application development. According to Gartner, for instance, there are several different forms of PaaS. Enterprise PaaS is used to develop custom applications. In Gartner terminology, the software used to set up an enterprise PaaS in an organization is called a Cloud Enabled Application Platform (CEAP) and is defined as “application servers extended with cloud-supporting functionality.”
Enterprise PaaS technology is used in these ways:
• As part of an overall cloud strategy to reduce frictions between developers and internal IT. The enterprise PaaS may include IaaS (public or private) or may be deployed without those solutions.
• To cloud enable existing applications for scaling, multi-tenancy, elasticity, etc.
• To manage API access and host a microservice architecture strategy, where API layers are built up to abstract access and tasks that cross disparate systems to enable business level developers to quickly create mash-up applications of enterprise services.
• As a hybrid bridge from an internal data center and the public cloud.
Enterprise PaaS can deliver different levels of value depending on the vendor’s foundational doctrine and the technology maturity of the solution.
How does PaaS fit into the IT Ecosystem?It’s important to understand where PaaS interacts with and / or overlaps with other pieces of the IT puzzle.
A PaaS will be installed on top of resources delivered by bare metal servers, virtual machines, IaaS provided VMs, and / or public cloud resources. Most PaaS systems have the ability to automate growth of the PaaS by interacting with an IaaS or physical infrastructure management platform.
PaaS platforms are designed to run custom-built SOA applications. The PaaS provides language and runtime support, for example which Java application servers are supported vary by platform. For different PaaS options, depth vs breadth of support also varies greatly.
COTS and larger OSS server systems (like a MongoDB cluster or Microsoft SharePoint Server) also are not candidates for hosting inside of a PaaS. Developer access to these systems may be brokered by the PaaS, but the resources are managed off-platform.
DevOps tools span from infrastructure configuration to software build and test automation. These tool sets can be integrated with PaaS platforms in multiple ways. Some examples include build system integration, automating the publishing of new application versions to the PaaS, and triggering an infrastructure automation process to grow the capacity of the PaaS platform.
Monitoring of application availability becomes a key function of the PaaS, so that load or the need for external monitoring platforms can be reduced or eliminated.
Tools that manage IaaS infrastructures or multi-cloud environments can be impacted by the introduction of a PaaS. Often some level of integration of the two components can be achieved to give a tiered view or integrated control of both platforms.
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What is the business value of an Enterprise PaaS?Enterprise PaaS can lead to competitive advantages, new sources of revenue, and savings on current infrastructure requirements. As custom software becomes a force in all markets, organizations that deliver applications faster, cheaper, and in the preferred method of consumption—mobile, tablet, workstation, etc. — will have an advantage. Enterprise private PaaS reduces the time to market of applications by automating the business processes around publishing software. For example, after an application is finished, the developer needs to interface with database administrators, solution architects, software architects, application owners, and enterprise architects in order to get it to market. The emails, meetings, and waiting can take months. Much of those processes can be streamlined by enterprise PaaS. The faster time to market can lead to an advantage over competitors and savings from efficiencies.
Organizations should evaluate enterprise PaaS technology when seeking to achieve the following:
• FA S T E R T I M E T O M A R K E T: An enterprise PaaS provides for a self-service utility model that allows developers to upload compiled code quickly and publish without the configuration tasks normally associated with deployments. Deployment times can be reduced to minutes from days, weeks, or months.
• I N C R E A S E D A G I L I T Y: Leveraging an enterprise PaaS simplifies application deployment and management and increases developer productivity.
• R E D U C E D C O S T S : An enterprise PaaS allows for greatly improved infrastructure utilization due to the more resource-efficient container model and removes human configuration tasks and associated error rates.
• R E D U C E D C O M P L E X I T Y: An enterprise PaaS simplifies ongoing application management by abstracting applications away from infrastructure and enforcing common architecture patterns.
• S T R E A M L I N E D A P P L I C AT I O N M A N A G E M E N T: An enterprise PaaS enables management of all custom applications via a common methodology, reducing IT governance concerns.
Public PaaS vs. Enterprise PaaSPublic cloud is a model that has existed for a number of years and is often the one organizations are most familiar with. Public PaaS provides an application development platform while the service provider manages the infrastructure, including scaling of that infrastructure. Public cloud PaaS suffers two main shortcomings for large-scale enterprise adoption: vendor-specificity (lock-in) and lack of infrastructure control.
Most enterprises are hesitant to commit to a single cloud provider’s methodology, even if feature rich and easy to use. An enterprise PaaS can provide autonomy from cloud providers.
Although public IaaS and community cloud IaaS (AWS FedCloud) has seen moderate uptake by enterprises for certain workloads—research and development, for example—public PaaS has not seen significant usage in the enterprise due to the perceived security risks. While the risks may be debated, responsibility for governance lies within the enterprise and cannot be outsourced to a public cloud vendor for a significant portion of applications.
Use of IaaS resources from public providers to create a hybrid cloud is seen as a bridge to the usage of variable, potentially more cost-effective resources, while still maintaining a high level of control over network and server configuration. An enterprise PaaS provides a layer over both internal and external resources so that operations can extend the service capability, yet maintain control.
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1 www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2599315
Hybrid has become a popular option that mixes both public and private cloud. According to Gartner, roughly half of enterprise organizations are considering or have a hybrid cloud environment by 2015.1
O R G A N I Z AT I O N B E S T P R A C T I C E S
Some of the biggest challenges of implementing a new solution have nothing to do with the technology. According to one Gartner poll, 78% of end-user respondents said one of the biggest challenges to implementing private cloud computing services was “management and operational processes.” Over half, 52%, said that corporate culture was one of the biggest issues. Technology was dead last on the list of issues.
Documenting your organization’s capabilities and requirements will make your selection process more streamlined and help keep you focused on the areas of most importance.
What follows are some areas to focus on when evaluating an enterprise private PaaS (organized by role):
CIO/CTOs:CIOs and CTOs are often most concerned about increased agility and reduced cost. CIOs and CTOs should consider where enterprise private PaaS fits into the gaps and what current areas will be streamlined. CIOs and CTOs of central IT will want to focus on the overall ease of implementing the PaaS in the organization and the associated cost.
As with any enterprise service selection, the technology being implemented should have a track record of success (reference accounts), a well-defined installation process, and post-install support. The pricing structure should be easily understood and should scale with the deployment in a logical way.
CIOs and CTOs should consider the following:
• Which enterprise roles will become redundant and will thus free up labor to work in other areas?
• What solutions will no longer be needed and how much will that save the organization?
• For central IT, how will enterprise PaaS help service the lines of business, positioning IT as a revenue source for the organization?
• What are the top enterprise options for Java, .NET, and the other primary languages of the organization?
• Will enterprise private PaaS bring any additional value to the organization besides reducing friction between IT and developers? For example, will it enable new business?
• How does enterprise private PaaS fit into the overall cloud strategy?
• Will a specific enterprise PaaS lock us into other technologies from that vendor or the vendor’s parent company?
• What other solutions is the enterprise private PaaS dependent on? Does it require additional purchases?
• Is the enterprise private PaaS able to integrate with all existing solutions equally or is it better integrated with one vendor by design rather than another vendor?
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Developers:Helping developers remain focused on developing and reusing code are some of the strongest benefits of a PaaS. Selecting an enterprise PaaS that has useful middleware and uses the tools that the developers are already familiar with—e.g. Visual Studio or Eclipse—is important.
Interacting with the PaaS should be natural and intuitive for the developers. This can mean tool support such as working with code editors and integration with continuous integration tool sets. If your development process is DevOps-oriented—meaning your developers are used to writing scripts to manage infrastructure tasks—introducing a PaaS will potentially be disruptive. It can either remove some of the need for DevOps (which could be a cultural change) or it could give them a better tool.
To best understand how PaaS and particular PaaS vendors will assist, it is good to know the process developers go through and be able discuss this with enterprise PaaS providers. This information will be key in understanding ROI as well and ensure the product will enhance or integrate into the existing process.
• How do end-users authenticate today? Are there multiple systems in use, such as federation?
• Do applications cross organization unit boundaries? For example – do you have a custom-written HR “open job tracking” tool so anyone in the enterprise can see open positions across the enterprise?
– What are the data segmentation requirements for these cross-platform apps? – Is the user experience consistent across organizational units?
• Do the end users have an “application store” type site or a request portal where they can easily find applications or data that is applicable to their role?
• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience, perspective, and guidance?
• Will the enterprise PaaS help with building more advanced software architectures, such as SaaS multi-tenant applications?
• How much time is spent in changing applications via upgrades?
• Is elastic application scaling a development / architecture consideration? How much overhead does this add to the development process?
Chief Software Architects:Because chief software architects have a role in both the infrastructure and line of business development sides, they often are essential for stewarding the onboarding of enterprise PaaS in an organization.
• What are the prevalent development languages in use today?
• What are the development tools in use (such as Eclipse or Visual Studio)?
• Are there a significant amount of legacy applications?
• Are new applications being deployed to new VMs (via containers) or to a shared hosting environment?
• Which centralized source code repository is being used?
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• Are continuous build & deploy technologies in use today?
• How are applications deployed in conformance with governance?
• How is application scaling implemented?
• Are DevOps practices in common use today (like Chef / Puppet) used by developers?
• How long does it take for a new application to move from “tested” to “production”—including server and storage provisioning, network configuration, internal meetings to discuss deployment, and maintenance methods?
• What are the most common back-end systems being connected to (like RDBMS, NoSQL data, mainframe services, SharePoint, SAP, external web services, etc.)
• Do applications have a user or role-based feature?
• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience and guidance?
• What is the process when applications need to have elastic scale? Is it a development consideration, requiring architecture resources, or do you develop for elastic scale, or both?
• Is reducing the number of architectural patterns or standardizing existing ones a concern for your organization?
IT Administrators:The role of an IT administrator for a PaaS is ensuring the platform has the resources necessary and that policies are put in place to enable developers to safely self-provision. By placing the policy intelligence in the platform, the IT administrators are free to work on other areas – like a VDI or Big Data initiative. IT administration typically shoulders the purchasing process for a PaaS in an enterprise as it is a shared resource. For IT administrators, a PaaS helps deliver self-service capabilities, reduces the impact of custom application development on administers, and lowers the overall cost to run applications, resulting in higher ROI for the development investment.
Enterprise PaaS can also help with the provisioning of applications based on policies. For example, sometimes it is less costly to develop an application in the public IaaS, but because of organizational governances the application may need to stay on-premises. Enterprise PaaS can orchestrate the movement of that application from the public IaaS provider to the private data center.
• Is there a centralized IaaS tier maintained? How are resources (virtual machines) procured on it—via service request or self-service portal? Or by developers?
• What percentage of hardware resources are dedicated to custom applications vs. shrink-wrap servers?
• How is governance implemented? Network VLANs, physical server segmentation based on policy, etc.
• Are public cloud resources in use today? Is the usage autonomous of IT management and governance or is it integrated into central IT as a supported resource?
• Are there self-service trends such as end-user ITaaS portals where users can request or execute change management requests rapidly?
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• Is there a centralized logging system in place?
• Is there an application discovery product in use?
• How are applications retired?
• Are performance and / or availability SLA tiers maintained or is there a single SLA for all applications?
• What are the system integration points of importance? Some examples of these are change management, policy management, application performance monitoring, and log management systems.
• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience and guidance?
External Influences – Initiatives Interacting with PaaSUnderstanding how the PaaS fits into the IT eco-system—how it’s influenced by or influences other IT projects / requirements can be relevant to the decision making order or process. Consider the following:
• How does the PaaS fit into disaster recovery / business continuity planning?An enterprise PaaS, with the abstracted application packages and an application repository, can enable faster recovery to an alternate platform. Since current enterprise PaaS platforms do not address data recoverability, data replication still needs to be addressed separately.
• What are the tools in use by administrators to manage IT resources?Platforms with APIs can be integrated or may already contain integrations to work with the IaaS or central IT management platforms. This functionality would enable monitoring and more efficient allocation of resources to the PaaS.
• What other projects can coincide to help kick start the PaaS?Server O/S End-of-Life migrations, IaaS and Private Cloud initiatives are all potential “entry points” to introduce a new enterprise PaaS solution. Combining the multiple projects in a sensible way can spur adoption and realize an earlier ROI.
• Extreme High Availability RequirementsCertain applications require an absolute guaranteed availability. Careful examination would need to be done to understand how the PaaS will react to changes in the underlying infrastructure, failure of services, and its own self-healing nature, and how planned and unplanned events would affect application behavior before trusting applications of an ‘always-on’ nature to an enterprise PaaS.
Proof of ConceptThe most common method for validating which PaaS will work best is via trial or proof-of-concept of the solutions that meet baseline criteria. Even if there is a clear choice of vendors, it often still makes sense to do a limited production trial or proof of concept. It will provide confirmation of the vendor’s claims and allow internal teams to interact with the vendor implementation team. Just as importantly, it allows for testing how existing applications are migrated onto the platform, and how new application development can take advantage of any features offered by the platform. You can expect this process to take from one to three months, depending on resource availability and planning.
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The development teams assigned can be used to test the implementation and workflow, to identify and refactor any process or technical requirements that weren’t documented adequately, and to provide feedback on overall benefit to your organization. Another key takeaway from developers will be feedback on how to promote adoption within the greater enterprise as well as assist with the evangelism. Developer surveys can be used to provide additional data points based on perceived increases in agility, reduction of deployment time, policy compliance, etc.
If the proof of concept is open to all developers, monitoring usage of the platform over time can be a telling data point on how enthusiastically the developer community is adopting the platform. Note that if the developer community doesn’t have confidence in the platform being available long term, it will have a negative influence on adoption as they may not want to invest time in a transient platform, or have to refactor code at a later date.
Quantifying the reduction in time to deploy applications and the reduction in workload will be important assessment points to determine effectiveness and ROI. Other metrics to gather before and after are number of revisions presented to users (agility) per some month or quarter.
Scoring, RFP, and Evaluation CriteriaCloud computing is a rapidly transforming technology and enterprise PaaS is at a hyper growth phase. Because the solutions are constantly adding new features, the preferred method for evaluation is a score card with general criteria that meet the program’s goals. A supplemental score card can be found in an accompanying Excel file.
If the organization is required or wishes to undergo a formal request for proposal (RFP) process, then a separate RFP template for enterprise PaaS is available.
S U M M A R Y O F I N F O R M AT I O N T O G AT H E R P R I O R T O T H E S E L E C T I O N O F A N E N T E R P R I S E PA A S
CIO/CTO/Director• Which enterprise roles will become redundant and will thus free up labor to work in other areas?
• What solutions will no longer be needed and how much will that save the organization?
• For central IT, how will enterprise PaaS help service the lines of business, positioning IT as a revenue source for the organization?
• What are the top enterprise options for Java, .NET, and the other primary languages of the organization?
• Will enterprise private PaaS bring any additional value to the organization besides reducing friction between IT and developers? For example, will it enable new business?
• How does enterprise private PaaS fit into the overall cloud strategy?
• Will a specific enterprise PaaS lock us into other technologies from that vendor or the vendor’s parent company?
• What other solutions is the enterprise private PaaS dependent on? Does it require additional purchases?
• Is the enterprise private PaaS able to integrate with all existing solutions equally or is it better integrated with one vendor by design rather than another vendor?
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Developers• How do end-users authenticate today? Are there multiple systems in use, such as federation?
• Do applications cross organization unit boundaries? For example – do you have a custom-written HR “open job tracking” tool so anyone in the enterprise can see open positions across the enterprise?
– What are the data segmentation requirements for these cross-platform apps? – Is the user experience consistent across organizational units?
• Do the end users have an “application store” type site or a request portal where they can easily find applications or data that is applicable to their role?
• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience, perspective, and guidance?
• Will the enterprise PaaS help with building more advanced software architectures, such as SaaS multi-tenant applications?
• How much time is spent in changing applications via upgrades?
• Is elastic application scaling a development / architecture consideration? How much overhead does this add to the development process?
Software Architects• What are the prevalent development languages in use today?
• What are the development tools in use (such as Eclipse or Visual Studio)?
• Are there a significant amount of legacy applications?
• Are new applications being deployed to new VMs (via containers) or to a shared hosting environment?
• Which centralized source code repository is being used?
• Are continuous build & deploy technologies in use today?
• How are applications deployed in conformance with governance?
• How is application scaling implemented?
• Are DevOps practices in common use today (like Chef / Puppet) used by developers?
• How long does it take for a new application to move from “tested” to “production”—including server and storage provisioning, network configuration, internal meetings to discuss deployment, and maintenance methods?
• What are the most common back-end systems being connected to (like RDBMS, NoSQL data, mainframe services, SharePoint, SAP, external web services, etc.)
• Do applications have a user or role-based feature?
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• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience and guidance?
• What is the process when applications need to have elastic scale? Is it a development consideration, requiring architecture resources, or do you develop for elastic scale, or both?
• Is reducing the number of architectural patterns or standardizing existing ones a concern for your organization?
IT Administrators• Is there a centralized IaaS tier maintained? How are resources (virtual machines) procured on it—via service request or
self-service portal? Or by developers?
• What percentage of hardware resources are dedicated to custom applications vs. shrink-wrap servers?
• How is governance implemented? Network VLANs, physical server segmentation based on policy, etc.
• Are public cloud resources in use today? Is the usage autonomous of IT management and governance or is it integrated into central IT as a supported resource?
• Are there self-service trends such as end-user ITaaS portals where users can request or execute change management requests rapidly?
• Is there a centralized logging system in place?
• Is there an application discovery product in use?
• How are applications retired?
• Are performance and / or availability SLA tiers maintained or is there a single SLA for all applications?
• What are the system integration points of importance? Some examples of these are change management, policy management, application performance monitoring, and log management systems.
• Who are the stakeholders that can offer valuable experience and guidance?
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F I N D O U T F O R YO U R S E L F
If you are interested in finding out more about Apprenda’s Private Platform-as-a-Service, the best way is to experience it for yourself.
Apprenda offers three simple ways to do this:
1. Sign up for the monthly Open Demo webinar2. Request access to Apprenda Express – and explore the free version of the platform3. Arrange a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for your organization
Also to learn more about Apprenda, contact us.
Apprenda is the leading enterprise Platform as a Service (PaaS) powering the next generation of enterprise software development in public, private and hybrid clouds. As a foundational software layer and application run-time environment, Apprenda abstracts away the complexities of building and delivering modern software applications, enabling enterprises to turn ideas into innovations faster. With Apprenda, enterprises can securely deliver an entire ecosystem of data, services, applications and APIs to both internal and external customers across any infrastructure.
Apprenda, Inc.433 River StreetTroy NY 12180
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