Solving the Private vs. Public PaaS Dichotomy: Discover CloudBees AnyCloud!

Written by: Sacha Labourey
5 min read

Demonstrating CloudBees' leadership in PaaS innovation, today we are announcing AnyCloud: a unique offering that will redefine and further broaden the PaaS market . AnyCloud provides the ability to have a unified view of your applications managed by CloudBees' PaaS, while physically deploying those on any infrastructure: public, hosted provider or even on-premise, in your own datacenter. Any cloud, anywhere.

A growing number of companies are increasingly turning to Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a way to improve their time-to-market, increase their agility and reduce their costs. The CloudBees Platform, for instance, provides application development, deployment and management services and eliminates much of the operations cost and IT hassles normally encountered by developers. And because it is available as a SERVICE , there is no need for you to setup either infrastructure or any software.

Unfortunately, for some companies, the promise of PaaSbashes up against the reality of enterprise constraints:

  • How can I use a PaaS and get low-latency access to data that sits on-premise and that I cannot move to the cloud?

  • How can I abide by security and privacy rules and still use PaaS?

  • How can I keep my processing and data in a specific region?

One solution to these problems is to a deploy a private PaaS – or “Platform as a Software ” – a PaaS that you install, configure, patch and upgrade much like you do your existing middleware products. In doing so, IT is taking on another layer of software to maintain, update and pay for support on.

The truth is that a key part of the promise of PaaS lies in the “S”, as in SERVICE . When you choose a private PaaS path, you are forced into delivering the service for the PaaS yourself! Your IT team hopes it can forget everything it has learned about operating system and middleware configuration and support, but in reality it will have to be re-trained for something entirely new! You therefore continue to bear the infrastructure capital costs, in addition to the operational costs for maintaining the infrastructure. Thus, as illustrated conceptually above, the potential operational efficiencies of PaaS compared to IaaS are masked by the continued burden for both the infrastructure itself as well as your continued operational obligations associated with it.

In contrast, when you use a service provider, as opposed to a software vendor who is “enabling” you to provide service, you get a number of benefits that lead to lower cost and better service:

  1. The service provider reduces your operational cost. The expertise to manage the technical intersection between complex middleware and complex PaaS software is part of the provider’s responsibility, not yours. You can focus better on your core business.

  2. Service providers get better economies of scale. The expertise they have in-house is leveraged across thousands of customers.

  3. Service providers have an incentive to invest in operational efficiency. Any vendor has an incentive to improve its margins.

Getting Rid of the Public vs. Private Dichotomy!

Consequently, companies considering using a PaaS face what has become a typical dichotomy:

  • Either they can opt for a Public PaaS and enjoy all of the benefits of increased agility, much improved time-to-market and reduced costs, but not be able to move some of their applications onto that PaaS for technical/latency or privacy issues;

  • Or they can opt for a Private “PaaSoftware ” in order to satisfy their technical and privacy requirements, but they will most probably never see the full benefit from increased agility, time-to-market or reduced-cost compared to their existing middleware setup (au contraire).

Announcing CloudBees AnyCloud

As a solution to this recurring problem, today, as the Java PaaS innovation leader, we are announcing CloudBees’ AnyCloud .

The AnyCloud architecture solves the above dichotomy by providing the best of both worlds: a fully-serviced PaaS (by CloudBees) that enables a multitude of deployment scenarios at the same time : on public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) in multiple regions, on traditional hosting providers (on vSphere for example) as well as on-premise, on your own servers, inside your own data center!

( NOTE: More information on the AnyCloud architecture is available in our CloudBees AnyCloud white paper . )

By opting for a supported CloudBees AnyCloud hosting provider or by registering servers in your data center, CloudBees AnyCloud delivers the operational cost savings and cloud efficiency of a fully-managed PaaS to your business – on any cloud – while satisfying your technical and privacy constraints.

With AnyCloud, your developers and lines of business get the benefits of zero-friction development and deployment and faster-time-to-market while getting low-latency access to your most important on-premise resources and existing investments. Same if you’re concerned about keeping your applications and data in a specific region due to privacy or regulatory concerns: AnyCloud is the answer. And if you already have a trusted hosting provider or preferred infrastructure cloud vendor, AnyCloud helps you enjoy the benefits of a fully serviced PaaS with the vendor relationship and investment you’re comfortable with.

More information on the AnyCloud architecture is available in our CloudBees AnyCloud white paper .

In addition to our existing production US-based offerings, we are currently rolling out support for AWS in Europe, OVH in Europe , as well as AnyCloud support in your own datacenter. If you are interested in AnyCloud, just contact us .

Onward,

Sacha

Sacha Labourey, CEO and Founder
CloudBees
cloudbees.com

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