Alex Barnett blog : Tech

Time to Define "Platform as a Service" (or PaaS)

alexbarnett — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:27:00 GMT

Before joining Bungee Labs last year, I knew they were on to something big. I mean, really big.

A big idea, an ambitious vision: to provide developers with end-to-end development, testing, deployment and hosting of sophisticated web applications as a service delivered purely in the cloud.

Since we announced our private beta back in May 2007, we've had over 1,500 developers sign up. In January alone we had over 400 developers kicking the tires - not just signing up and disappearing, but 400 returning developers, learning, building and deploying out increasingly sophisticated apps on a fast evolving developer platform, requiring no install of anything on their machine - all through the browser.

And since May 2007, the trend to delivering software as a service (SaaS) has been moving at terrific pace. New web APIs are being made available every month and new announcements by start-ups as well established big players are reinforcing and fueling the acceleration to the inevitable world of cloud computing.

As we announce our move from private to public beta today, we've also tried to articulate the new category of product and service we believe Bungee Connect is at the forefront of defining, the category of Platform as a Service, or PaaS, and our big bet is that PaaS is the next big thing.

So what is a "Platform as a Service"?

In September 2006, Marc Andreessen posted his thought provoking "The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet" and it got a fair level attention from the web industry. And we took note. We thought what Marc was describing in his Level 3 definition where:

"A Level 3 platform's apps run inside the platform itself -- the platform provides the "runtime environment" within which the app's code runs.",

...was right, but only partly right. Given Bungee Labs' ambition and vision, we felt there was a lot more to Marc's definition of the highest level definition of an "internet platform", a definition more holistic and comprehensive than a runtime.

But we kept focused, kept working on what we were hearing our developers telling us we needed to fix and improve on Bungee Connect, to give what developers are telling us what they really want - a Platform as a Service - to provide everything required in the lifecycle for the development through hosting of full-on, sophisticated and highly interactive web apps, not just widgets.

As we were readying for our next phase -our public beta - we thought it would be a good time to put a stake in the ground and actually define what we mean when we use the term Platform-as-a-service, and thereby describe the comprehensiveness what Bungee Connect has to offer.

So early this morning, our CTO and Founder of Bungee Labs, Dave Mitchell posted a definition describing PaaS in concrete terms.

What follows is a summary of Dave's post, with a selection of my favorite "soundbites" and ideas, but I suggest you read the whole post for yourself - there's a fair amount to consider:

1) Develop, Test, Deploy, Host and Maintain on the Same Integrated Environment.

"It’s time to stop developing “here” and running “there”. Today, most applications are coded in one environment (usually custom-built for that project by a developer), then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production...In a completely-realized PaaS, the entire software lifecycle is supported on the same computing environment, dramatically reducing costs of development and maintenance, time-to-market and project risk. A PaaS should let developers spend their time creating great software, rather than building environments and wrestling with configurations just to make their applications run — let alone testing, tuning and debugging them...Also, an end-to-end PaaS should provide a high productivity Integrated Development Environment (IDE) running on the actual target delivery platform, so that debugging and test scenarios run in the same environment as production deployment.

2) User Experience Without Compromise

"A Platform-as-a-Service must deliver compelling user experiences, with all the richness and live interactivity that consumers have been conditioned to expect....Hiccups like software downloads or plug-in installations, browser dependencies and inconsistencies, or local executables break the web model, and are inherently less secure, less maintainable and less user-friendly. In order to be relevant and popular, PaaS must deliver the best user experience available on the web, comparable to or better than conventional approaches.

3) Built-in Scalability, Reliability, and Security

"Developers should be free to build applications with the comfort that the security of customer data, network traffic, source code (intellectual property) and even server hardware is maintained automatically by the platform through-out application development and delivery."

4) Built-in Integration with Web Services and Databases.

"Applications need to leverage existing software investments in databases, and internal or external third party web services, requiring that the platform offer a wide variety of connectivity options."

5) Support Collaboration

"A PaaS must support both formal and on-demand collaboration throughout the entire software lifecycle (development, testing, documentation and operations), while maintaining security of source code and associated intellectual property."

6) Deep Application Instrumentation

"With instrumentation, organizations can see exactly how users are using the application, the type of performance they are experiencing and any application crashes. This information can also be leveraged to create new business models where costs are tied to actual utilities, rather than flat-rate subscriptions or licenses."

Over the next couple of years we expect to be hearing a lot more about PaaS and how "Y announcement" by "X company" is now providing true a PaaS offering to businesses and developers.

But saying you are providing a Platform as a Service has to mean something, and we think the above definition sets a high but reasonable standard that must be met for any company to claim they are providing a "platform-as-a-service' and legitimately describe themselves as a PaaS player.

The amazing thing is, for me at least, is that Bungee Connect is delivering all of the above, today. From our point of view, delivering PaaS - the real deal - is not statement of Bungee's intent, it's a statement of fact. It's bold, but so is our vision. Yes, we've still a lot to do before we're commercially ready and we think that's coming soon, but so much is already there. Try it out.

Ozzie's "Cloud OS" Raises More Questions than Answers

alexbarnett — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:04:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie's briefing this week provided quite a bit more detail around Microsoft's "Software Plus Services" strategy. It's definitely worth a read (or a look, and if you're feeling too lazy for either you can read Nick Carr's summary).

It's been a year since Ozzie took over the role as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates, and I think it is exciting to see his influence further emerge throughout the business, architectural and experential direction of Microsoft. The 30 year old company needs this injection - a shot in the arm. And his vision is the right one. It is the only one that has any chance of seeing Microsoft through its need for growth.

However, as the Ozzie's "Cloud OS" story slowly becomes more concrete, the future influence that Microsoft will have throughout the software and internet services ecosystem is becoming less clear.

Yes, we know Software as a Service (Saas) is becoming an increasingly significant trend, and we know that the enabling role Web Services (SOAP and REST based) has to play as part of the overall move to a distributed computing model is becoming ever more central, and we know that the browser will continue to further its dominance as the primary interface between humans and data, functionality and people, but what is not so clear is how many "major players" there will be in that future, what their roles will be, nor what the roles of the "everyone elses" will be.

Microsoft Partners have been assured a place by Microsoft's side in this future, but does anyone really know? How will all this fall out? How will Microsoft's traditional partner profile fit into Ozzie's new brave future? What kind of ecosystems will emerge? Will Microsoft's ecosystem of tomorrow look radically different to its ecosystem of today? Who are the Microsoft partners of today who will find themselves competing head-to-head with Microsoft tomorrow? What will Microsoft's competition of the future even look like?

The answers to some of these question may surprise us. How many people, for example, would have imagined a just few years ago that search engine providers or an online bookseller or online university network would emerge to become a serious potential competitor in the computing and software space of Microsoft? Not many. In the second internet age Microsoft's future competition and partners can literally come from any direction at any time. And they often do. In many respects, the future looks bright, but I suspect that for many in the software / computing industry the future is also very cloudy indeed.

Dr. Peter Chen - the ER Model and ADO.NET Entity Framework - Podcast

alexbarnett — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:49:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago Dr Peter Chen, inventor of the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), visited the Microsoft Campus to provide a lecture sharing his thoughts on the ADO.NET Entity Framework. As we were planning his visit, he was very keen to make sure that his views could be shared with a wider audience beyond Microsoft employees, so we agree to record some sessions while on campus.

His original paper on the Entity-Relationship model (ER model), published in 1976 is one of the most cited papers in the computer software field. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him, Sam Druker, Jose Blakeley, Britt Johnston, Erik Meijer, Pedro Cellis where we heard how his ideas on the ER model were formulated some 30 years ago. Lot's more fascinating conversation all about this history of databases, and their future too...

The next morning, I picked up Dr Chen from the hotel and drove him to the recording studio to meet with Britt, Jose and Brian Beckman where they got talking for an hour with the microphone on. Here's the podcast, hosted on Channel 9 (.mp3 here) It is superb. I mean it. If you're into 'data', you'll love it.

"Beckman interviews Dr. Chen along with Jose Blakeley, Software Architect, SQL Server, and Britt Johnston, Director of Program Management, Data Programmability. Join as we discuss the ideas behind Dr. Chen's original paper, how these concepts have subsequently influenced the software industry and database technologies, and how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is an execution runtime for the ER model."

Astrophysicist-turned-Programming-Language-Designer

admin — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 09:27:00 GMT

In my first week with the Data Programmability team, my new manager suggested I set up a bunch of introductory meetings with some of the team members. One of the very first of these meetings was with Software Architect Brian Beckman. I spent an hour with him and was totally blown away.

This is Brian, holding a copy of the 'Towards 2020" report published by Microsoft Research that he contributed to this year:

As I was sitting and listening to Brian's stream of consciousness I felt like I was watching a live 3D version of a Channel 9 video. At the end of our chat I asked him if he wouldn't mind me asking Charles Torre of Channel 9 to interview him. I really wanted others to have the chance to hear him talk. He happily agreed and the end result is now up for downloading on Channel 9. It's a large download but worth it - you'll be thoroughly entertained.

Brian is a cosmologist / astrophysicist / quantum physicist / academic-turned-programming language designer (!). His bookshelf is one of the more unusual you'll see around campus in terms of the mix (and is the only person I know other than me to own a Steve Wolfram book (I have A New Kind of Science - an extraordinary work).

He spent his early career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) researching nutty stuff such as the Time Warp Operating System and virtual time theory, distributed computing - running the Game of Life and virtual billiards on parallel processors, and developing War Game simulators for government (a little bit like the Game of Life, but more of a Game of Death involving large-scale nuclear warhead deployments and massive Soviet troop and tank maneuver scenarios: think of it as Sims Massively-Accelerated-Anti-Evolution Edition)...

Brian joined the Microsoft Research team years ago (before it was known as MSR) and today leads the our research and product incubation efforts in the Data Programmability team. He loves his functional programming languages: Haskell (Erik Meijer is one of Haskell's designers and is also in Brian's team) and Scheme. And he loves his Monads: Erik and Brian jointly wrote 'The Return of the Monoids' (not a science-fiction horror script, but research paper). As an example of what Brian does today, he was involved in the development of the Entity Data Model (EDM) into ADO.NET. This technology recently saw the light of day in ADO.NET Entity Framework CTP), with Brian taking on the role of translating the theoretical and mathematical models of EDM developed by the research team into coded concepts the product teams could interpret and then develop the technology for ADO.NET, SQL Server, and Visual Studio. In our first meeting we spent some time discussing the dynamic languages Ruby, Python and Perl - the great news for me was that he was very familiar with these and is actually quite a big fan of them although his day-to-day attention is focused on VB.NET as you can see from the video.

Mr Beckman collects calculators. He showed me one I've never see before - the CURTA Calculator. (The story behind its invention is as amazing as the device itself.)

He also show me this:

...which he has programmed to print out these:

His desktop scientific print calculator simply crunches out prime numbers, all day long, every day and has done for years.

Each new prime takes a little longer to calculate than the previous prime. Currently it takes about 6 hours to work out the next prime number. Earlier this year our team ran an internal competition - ADO.NET Idol: it's simple: the coolest app developed by a member the DP / SQL team using the ADO.NET vNext / EDM stack wins. Brian won it by developing an full-on emulator of the print calculator, GUI and all, programming each of the calculator's functions into a virtual ADO.NET vNext calculator to calculate and print out the prime numbers (at a considerably faster rate than the real calculator of course...). For fun.

Anyway, along with Brian and Erik and loads of others on the team, I've always plenty to learn each day around here...

Moving my blog

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 15:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog ....(read more)

Sir Tim: Calm Down 2.0

Alex Barnett blog — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 23:20:00 GMT

This is what The Register said Sir TBL said about Web 2.0: "You should thank Tim Berners-Lee. Not just for giving us the web, but for articulating what's gone wrong in the lexicon and thinking of Silicon Valley. Hopefully, his standing in the web community...(read more)

I've not met Frank, but I know about his shirt.

Alex Barnett blog — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:18:00 GMT

I've not met Frank Arrigo in person, but I know about his shirt. In the latest episode of the 'Frank and His Shirt' reality show series, the hunt is on for an apparent posuer . The background to this rather potracted saga is a story unto itself, even...(read more)

Top 10 Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Apps

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:58:00 GMT

Somasega introduces the ' Top 10 Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Apps ' 1. Follow the Windows Vista style guidelines 2. Enrich the user experience 3. Enable users to visualize, organize, and search 4. Run securely 5. Design for reliability and manageability...(read more)

RSS feeds, OPMLs and Grazr

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:37:00 GMT

Kevin Briody of the Windows Live team has published the RSS feeds he subscribes to as OPML files for your feedreader. Some good feeds worth checking out there, including a bunch of Windows Live individual employee and team blogs. Kevin, one way of displaying...(read more)

Windows Live WiFi - beta testers wanted!

Alex Barnett blog — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Laura John (who I used to work with while we were both at MSDN / TechNet), has blogged about something I've not heard of before...Windows Live WiFi: "We provide dial-up access to a ton of users across the United States but we've also been working on a...(read more)

IE7 - RCs, Changes and CSS

Alex Barnett blog — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 22:04:00 GMT

As you probably know by now, Dean Hachamovitch announced this morning that Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is ready for download . So what is the difference between a 'Release Candidate' (RC) and a 'Beta'? Here's the short answer from Dean...(read more)

150 cool Windows XP downloads

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 12:00:00 GMT

150 cool Windows XP downloads . via JoshBlog...(read more)

1 line in XAML

Alex Barnett blog — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Tim Sneath asks : "What's the most impressive WPF demo you can construct in a single line of XAML? Can you improve on these?"...(read more)

Meet Erik Meijer on Channel 9 (and why he keeps a penguin in a box)

Alex Barnett blog — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 07:41:00 GMT

Meet Erik. Erik Meijer is an Architect in Microsoft's Data Programmability team. As you can see from these pics he let me shoot in his office, Erik keeps a penguin... I first knew of Erik when he was starring as the 'Head in the Box' on VBTV . (I wish...(read more)