Java PaaS

PaaS is about renting a software platform and running a custom business application on it. The promise of PaaS is to let developers focus on the business application and not have to worry about the hardware or the core software platform. Gartner famously stated that 2011 will be the year of PaaS. However, my many unscientific surveys at conferences in 2011 and 2012 showed that while there was great interest and experimentation happening with PaaS, actual adoption was pretty low. This was due to multiple factors, such as PaaS offerings not being mature enough, developer uncertainty, and managers being unwilling to change to a new shared model. Having said that, the various PaaS offerings have matured rapidly over the past year or so. Many now provide services comparable to what developers have been used to in on-premises Java EE environments. Now, some vendors don’t just provide a deployment environment; they even provide a rich development environment on the cloud. There’s healthy competition building up in this space, which should be good news for developers and customers. So while Java PaaS might not yet be the norm, adoption looks certain to keep rising at an ever-increasing pace.