Building a Better Cloud: The Future of IaaS + PaaS

Many organizations have turned to cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) to optimize developer productivity and increase business agility. However for all the benefits that each of these solutions can bring an organization, each faces real—but avoidable—limitations when used in isolation. On one hand IaaS requires too much configuration to offer the greatest benefit for increasingly agile development teams. At the same time PaaS doesn’t offer the customization and granular management IT needs to manage highly complex or legacy systems.

In order to maximize business agility, the next generation of cloud solutions must be optimized to support the complete app lifecycle for both new and legacy systems—from lightweight web interfaces to mission-critical, production applications. In practice this means a development, testing, and production environment that enables both PaaS’ ease of development while still including IaaS’ strong management capabilities and support for legacy applications.

The potential implementations of such an environment range from a cross-vendor IaaS-to-PaaS connection and management layer to a single provider running both IaaS and PaaS in a single unified platform. These next-generation implementations would allow developers to test and deploy to PaaS while IT retains the ability to port any apps to IaaS that require higher levels of control and configuration. All applications regardless of underlying systems and infrastructure could be managed through a single interface with uniform SLA criteria and administrative functions such as billing.

In this presentation, the speaker will discuss the current state of IaaS and PaaS integration—including insights regarding IaaS and PaaS adoption in the enterprise, sample use cases, and an exploration of the future of “as a service” cloud solutions. Additionally, the speaker will cover real-world customer implementation scenarios and demonstrate how this new cloud model is transforming their IT and business operations.

Attendees will come away from the presentation with a solid understanding about the benefits and limitations of both IaaS and PaaS, and will be equipped to begin planning an integrated cloud solution that meets their business needs.