What kind of service provider gets the same benefits from a composable system that a user does?
- CaaS
- Cloud-based storage
- PaaS
- AaaS
EXPLANATION
#1 Innovate Faster
First and foremost, using a PaaS to deploy and run your application enhances your agility.The Web is accelerating the pace of innovation. To compete, you need to quickly transform new ideas into real applications and evolve those applications with agility in order to meet fast-changing business and technical requirements. Market opportunities exist very briefly. Your business needs to build, deploy, and iterate in days or weeks, not months or years.
Setting up platform-level software to run your application is time-consuming and complex. By simplifying, automating, and in many cases eliminating the steps associated with setting up the foundation for your application, you can get your application deployed much more quickly in the first place, and you can iterate, adapt, and extend it more rapidly over time.
It takes us 50% less time to deploy on Engine Yard Cloud because it’s so easy to configure servers. We can deploy with just a few clicks and add another instance with just one more click—and on top of it all, everything is pre-configured by Rails experts at Engine Yard who could write the book on best practices for rapid deployment.
Do-it-Yourself on EC2 Use Engine Yard PaaS | Use Engine Yard PaaS |
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Initialize
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Initialize
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Update
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Update
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Scale
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Scale
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#2 Focus Resources
Eliminating much of the overhead to deploy and manage applications doesn’t just mean you can do certain things faster. It means you don’t have to do certain things at all. Which means that you don’t even need to know how to do them. Which allows you to be even better at knowing how to do the things that differentiate your business, like building applications with innovative features and exceptional user experiences.Let’s say you’re an entrepreneur with a great idea and some seed funding, or you’re an enterprise line-of-business manager with some spare budget you’d like to put on a special project. Do you want to spend your precious funding on some generalist developers who can code moderately well and also do system administration, or would you rather get top-notch coders who don’t necessarily have deployment expertise? Would you rather spend a dedicated headcount on an ops person or have an additional application developer?
By deploying on Engine Yard Cloud, we’ve saved at least 60% on engineering resources—this productivity boost translates directly to more features and faster time to market.
- Chris McNeilly, CTO, Motista
#3 Save Money
Focusing development resources and spending less headcount on unneeded expertise are both benefits that intuitively translate into reducing costs. But beyond these obvious things are even more ways that PaaS saves real money compared with doing it yourself on IaaS.With PaaS you are tapping into a real economy of scale. Imagine the number of hours it would take to set up the core stack—the platform-level components—for your applications. Imagine the hours consumed on an ongoing basis to maintain the stack. Imagine the cost of those hours, and consider the incremental value from this work to your application. Now consider those same costs amortized across thousands of applications. There is very little differentiating value from doing this low-level work yourself, so clearly, buying platform from a provider is more efficient than building it yourself.
We estimate that our costs are 3-5x lower than if we had to pay the direct and indirect costs of owning and managing our own infrastructure and deploying our large array of applications.There are also less obvious hidden costs, such as the cost of downtime when one of your administrators makes a mistake configuring your application server and no one can access your Web application for hours. According to a study by Uptime Institute, 70 percent of data center downtime is caused by human error. Consider both the hard costs of downtime, such as lost business and unexpected support costs, and the soft costs, such as idled employees and a tarnished reputation.
- Eric Peng, CEO, PlayMesh
#4 Get the Best Technology
The benefit of economies of scale doesn’t simply stop at getting the same thing for less money. What you actually end up with is something better, for less money. The stack and platform-level technology you would build yourself will almost never be as good as what a top PaaS will provide. Few companies have both the ability to pay and the attractiveness to hire the world’s best platform builders. The top platform builders are in companies whose main business is platform. People who are world-class in a given discipline for the most part want to work somewhere where that discipline is core to the business, not in an ancillary or supporting role.A PaaS typically employs specialists who constantly tune, optimize, load-balance, reconfigure, and so on. The result of faster page loads is often a reduction in bounce rates, because customers are more satisfied with the service level they experience. And since search engines use bounce rates and page load times to prioritize paid search rankings, faster application performance can substantially improve your application visibility and business performance.
We’ve mentioned the stack itself several times, and getting the best stack means getting a stack with the latest versions of all components, configured optimally to work with each other and as the foundation for applications such as yours. In addition to the stack itself, there is the deployment mechanism, the platform software that instantiates virtual servers on the infrastructure and installs instances of the stack on them. Many aspects differentiate a good deployment mechanism from a bad one: what configuration parameters are exposed, what component options exist, how stack versions are managed, what activities are automated, what components are pre-built into binaries versus compiled at deployment time, and so on.
With Engine Yard, we can deploy our application in five minutes, and we know we’re running on the best technology stack. If we were managing our own servers, we’d have to take resources away from development to invest in a dedicated IT/infrastructure engineer. Instead, we’re able to focus on building new features.Above all of this, there is the user interface, which may include GUI and CLI variants. Getting the user interface and user experience right is make-or-break for platform interaction. The best platform user interfaces will be simple yet flexible—the things you don’t care to customize shouldn’t get in the way, and the things you do want to customize should be easy to do so. The interface needs to be both learnable and usable—i.e. quick to get started with but also powerful enough to support the expert user.
- Damon Danieli, Founder and CTO, Z2Live