In a follow-up article to What is PAAS, Chris Keane highlights the dangers of vendor lock-in and how Open PAAS can help mitigate these issues. This is especially relevant after reading about Coghead being acquired by SAP. This is not just an issue for businesses – users of any web service risk downtimes as well as the company discontinuing service.
The advantage of going with big players (Amazon, Google, Salesforce) is that the chance of them going-under is very unlikely. Does this mean we will see mergers of smaller PAAS providers? Only time will tell.
McKinsey has recently made their paper ‘Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing’ available that highlights cloud computing being more expensive than in-house infrastructure. This has led to many follow-up articles.
Cloud Computing is a fasinating environment and it really levels the playing field for developer-shops of any size. As a sole developer, I can create an application using Salesforce, Amazon Web Services or any other PAAS provider and make this available to the whole world. As the application becomes more popular, scalability requirements can be increased seamlessly at the provider level.
However the hype that Cloud computing is generating sets the environment up for unrealistic expectations. Articles like the McKinsey report and judicial research by companies can mitigate this.
