PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Heroku Adds Scala And Cumulogic Goes OpenStack

Picture Credit: Saasmania.com

Gone are the days when I have to emphasize the importance of PaaS as the future of cloud services and we are now seeing a complete transformation of the PaaS space with all the PaaS vendors focussing on multi-language and multi-cloud trend. In fact, the PaaS layer is somewhat commoditized with very little differentiation and people are wondering where the differentiation is going to be. While players like AppFog and Heroku bet on user experience as a way to differentiate from others, RedHat is betting on their ability to offer the entire stack to enterprises. There is no consensus at this point about where the segment will go in the next two years but many are convinced that a big chunk of action is going to be in this segment. Keeping with the trend, Heroku (previous CloudAve coverage) and Cumulogic (previous CloudAve coverage) has made some announcements that are interesting in this context.

Heroku adds Scala

Heroku, after starting out as a Ruby on Rails PaaS shop, is aggressively expanding to other languages with their Polygot platform. After adding Python recently, Heroku yesterday announced that they are adding support for Scala, the programming language that combines object oriented programming with functional programming. Even though CloudFoundry (previous CloudAve coverage) already supports Scala, Heroku’s support for Scala is interesting from the point of view of where they are going. Heroku added Java support sometime back to take advantage of Salesforce’s sales team and attract enterprise developers. Scala will help these developers to move towards a more modern and flexible language easily. Enterprise Java programmers will find Scala interesting because

Scala supports all the Java libraries. It is possible to call directly into Java code
Java developers can still get the benefits of some of the inherent advantages of JVM
Scala is much faster than Java because for-comprehensions and maps in languages like Scala are at least 30% faster than iterations with While loops in languages like Java

etc.. With Scala growing at a very rapid pace, it is only logical for Heroku to add support for the language. Please read Adam’s blog post on the topic to get Heroku POV.

Cumulogic adds OpenStack support

OpenStack conference is currently going on in Boston and it is quite natural that we are bombarded with OpenStack related news. One such news in the context of PaaS is coming from Cumulogic. They have announced that they are adding support for OpenStack for the infrastructure underneath their PaaS layer. With this announcement Cumulogic now supports Amazon EC2, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, VMware and OpenStack. With Eucalyptus being focussed squarely on enterprise market, it is a good channel for them to enter the enterprise segment. With CloudStack, VMware and OpenStack, they can support both the enterprise private clouds and multiple service providers using this platform. Of course, they started off with Amazon EC2 and the support is going to continue.

With OpenStack getting decent traction (apart from HP betting their public clouds on it, I am aware of many enterprises, telecom and other service providers taking OpenStack seriously. However, I am not at a liberty to talk about it publicly), it is important for Cumulogic to be supporting this platform. In fact, they told me during the last OpenStack design summit itself that they are committed to supporting OpenStack and it is now part of the public beta release. Since CloudFoundry appears to have a close alignment with Ubuntu, OpenStack gives Cumulogic a very good channel to reach both the enterprise market as well as the service provider market. With Citrix being part of OpenStack project and RedHat having plans away from OpenStack, Cumulogic might get the necessary space to establish themselves at the PaaS layer of the OpenStack project.

Conclusion

PaaS space is definitely heating up big time and both these announcements are exciting. I am specifically pumped up about Cumulogic’s support for OpenStack because I think the first question I asked after they briefed me for the first time is about OpenStack support. It will be interesting to see how this dynamics works out. I am specifically interested in seeing how the open source community receives a proprietary layer on top of their project (I know OpenStack license is Apache and one can even make a proprietary or open core product out of it).