Thu Anh Pham

Bridging IaaS and PaaS

Bridge IaaS and PaaS to more efficiently and flexibly tackle the challenges of the modern connected enterprise.

As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production, they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, and deliver secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, service oriented delivery model possible.

What is IT agility?

Business agility can be defined as your ability to rapidly change business vectors. IT teams can measure their delivery against several IT as a Serviceperformance metrics.

New IaaS and PaaS Tooling Required

New tooling is often required to bridge Infrastructure as a Service with Platform as a Service.
New tools should provide IT as a Service that will provision instances, load balance traffic and services, scale and pool resources, and secure applications and data.

IaaS Delivers Midway Improvement

Using IaaS to transform and optimize delivery of compute, storage, and network is valuable, yet only provides half the benefits. After all, IaaS is only half of the run-time environment. With little knowledge of workloads running on top of IaaS, the IaaS must rely on coarse grained CPU, memory, and network utilization when scaling and balancing the run-time environment. Elastic scalability and resource pooling decisions may impact multiple application services, data resources, and business processes. Additionally, operations team members can develop standard building blocks, but are unable to fully blueprint an entire application solution.

Service-Oriented PaaS

To fully achieve Cloud benefits, the application platform must be re-invented into a Service-Oriented PaaS. A service-oriented PaaS offers the following APIs and self-service actions:

  • Choose application template blueprint
  • Auto-provision application platform
  • Auto-deploy application and services
  • Scale and balance tenants
  • Monitor platform and tune policies
  • Re-configure platform
  • Re-configure applications

The PaaS optimizes scale, balance, security, and quality of service at application level granularity. IaaS compute instances, IaaS storage instances, and application middleware components can be balanced across users, application sessions, business processes, application transactions, and APIs.

With insight into application resources, behavior, and footprint, an IaaS and PaaS combination can increase tenant density, right-size footprint, and reduce operational cost. A multi-tenant, shared container PaaS provides the optimal footprint.

Source: https://dzone.com/articles/bridging-iaas-and-paas