Next Frontier of Business Innovation - What do PaaS and DevOps have to offer?

Introduction

The cloud has changed expectations. Your customers expect more. Your business expects more. The pace of change has never been so fast and will never again be this slow.

Thousands of companies have adopted

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and successfully leveraged the flexibility to dramatically improve speed to market and scalability whilst controlling costs. Not only this, IaaS has enabled IT departments to reshape and repurpose their workforces and focus on innovating and developing new applications and services business.

However, most of the benefits of IaaS accrue to operations and infrastructure, not application development. As more companies realise that application innovation needs to move faster than ever before, the focus is shifting from infrastructure cost savings to how to make application development more productive.

Enter Platform as a Service (PaaS) and DevOps.

PaaS & DevOps

PaaS is a class of cloud computing service that provides a platform to develop, deploy and run applications without the cost and complexity of deploying and managing the required infrastructure, middleware (e.g. web servers, application frameworks) or database systems. However, PaaS offers much more than just a carbon-copy of on-premise software and in recent years there has been a proliferation of web, mobile, integration and data related platform services (PaaS).

By leveraging these pre-built services, automating environment provisioning, development and deployment processes, and increasing collaboration between the various stakeholders, PaaS amplifies development productivity and agility, accelerating application innovation and time to market.

Many of these PaaS qualities are aligned with DevOps practices and for this reason, PaaS is often seen as an enabler for DevOps.

The Next Frontier of Business Innovation

Many businesses understand that custom applications serve as a critical aspect of competitive differentiation and that these are the next frontier of business innovation. Moreover, as businesses demand innovation at an ever-increasing digital speed, applications must be created in timescales of days and weeks rather than months and years.

Thus, many organisations are increasingly turning to PaaS & DevOps to meet the demands of this new frontier, at digital speed.

About the Author

Nick Rumble is a Technical Solution Architect at Instrumentum and helps leading software vendors and businesses to migrate their products, applications, tooling and processes to new platforms and technologies, giving them competitive advantage and the tools to scale up their businesses. Contact Nick here to discuss your application modernisation or migration requirements.