COMMENT
P
laying on “PaaS,” Gartner coined
the term xPaaS in 2013 to
describe the broad spectrum of
specialised middleware products that IT
vendors offer as services, like integration
Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) or business
process management Platform-as-aservice (bpmPaaS). xPaaS seizes the
opportunity cloud computing provides to
reimagine application development and
operations, making these processes faster,
easier, less risky, and more flexible.
Middleware meeting the cloud has
facilitated the DevOps movement and
predictably transformed how developers
create applications and IT operations
professionals manage them. But
enterprise IT is only starting to experience
the xPaaS revolution’s most surprising
and exciting consequence as line of
business managers become more closely
involved in the software development
process than ever before. The rise of
“BizDevOps” is leading not only to tighter
collaboration between IT departments
and business managers, but also to
heightened expectations, with businesses
increasingly relying on technology to
carve out unique competitive advantages.
Accelerating time to market
One major benefit of xPaaS is
accelerating applications’ time to
market. Innovation demands the ability
to experiment, fail fast, and deliver
before the competition. Developers must
be free to focus on their applications,
unhampered by the need to provision,
configure, and secure their application
infrastructure. IT operations can’t take on
even more maintenance responsibilities,
especially when many stacks deployed
for the sake of rapid innovation may be
extremely short lived. Architects need to
provide an environment that maximises
productivity, minimises cost and risk, and
scales rapidly and securely.
The last generation of application
platforms, integration buses, and process
automation suites, while an improvement
over earlier home-grown solutions, fell
short of delivering critical functionality
on-demand without the need to acquire,
provision, and maintain application
infrastructure. xPaaS automates tedious
tasks like setup, configuration, and
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INTELLIGENTCIO
integration. Traditionally, developers
performed each of these functions for
each middleware product manually—a
time-consuming, error-prone process.
To communicate with the database, for
example, developers needed to obtain a
connection string in one place and input
it into a configuration file somewhere
else. With xPaaS, intuitive menus help
developers select their database and get
their systems up and running quickly.
xPaaS also speeds time to market by
accelerating trial and error. Engineers
and architects can often approach
development problems in multiple ways,
MIKE PIECH, VICE PRESIDENT
AND GENERAL MANAGER,
MIDDLEWARE, RED HAT
FOR DEVELOPERS
WORKING IN AN
xPaaS ENVIRONMENT,
REPLICATION IS
MUCH EASIER,
PARTLY BECAUSE
THE PLATFORM BUILT
THE ENVIRONMENT
AUTOMATICALLY,
AND PARTLY BECAUSE
THE PLATFORM
CONSISTENTLY
DOCUMENTS AND
AUDITS THE STEPS THAT
GO INTO CREATING THE
APPLICATION
several of which may appear equally
viable, leaving teams uncertain of which
to choose. Instead of having to sit and
envision every scenario before writing a
single line of code, developers working
in an xPaaS environment can simply try
different solutions and find out which
works best.
Reducing risk
The same xPaaS features that
accelerate time to market also reduce
development and deployment risk. An
intuitive GUI presents the simple logic
of the situation and automates the
complex, underlying processes, shielding
applications from a major source of risk:
human error. xPaaS takes advantage
of the fact that computers are better
at repeatedly executing tedious tasks,
which frees up humans to focus on
what they’re better at: higher-level logic,
thinking, and creativity.
xPaaS also de-risks the delicate
transition from development to
production. In the past, developers
would cobble together an intricate
and fragile environment on their
workstations, miraculously get
their application running, and the
moment they needed to recreate that
environment on the way to production,
forget how they built it—which versions
of which modules they used, for
example.
But for developers working in an xPaaS
environment, replication is much easier,
partly because the platform built the
environment automatically, and partly
because the platform consistently
documents and audits the steps that
go into creating the application. Once
developers build an application using
xPaaS, the underlying machinery can
produce however many instances are
needed.
Improving flexibility
Microservices and containers are the
latest in a long line of technology that
has catalysed the xPaaS revolution and
improved IT organisations’ flexibility.
Containers allow developers to
decompose applications into a
greater number of smaller modules,
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