…not that simple and therefore not always Amazon Web Services.
First off, we didn't take what might be construed as the typical approach, which would be to look either at infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. We combined the two, as the line between these categories is blurring. And historical category leaders have added either infrastructure or platform services that place them where they now straddle these lines.
Further, many people have assumed that all developers will be best served by PaaS products and ill served by IaaS products. Our research has shown for some time that that isn't so:
- Many developers get value from IaaS because it is so flexible, while PaaS products are generally too constraining.
- The -aaS labels overlook the actual capabilities of the services available to developers. All PaaS products are not the same; all IaaS are not the same.
- Not all developers are the same. Devs will use the services (PLURAL) with the best fit to their skills, needs, and goals.
The reality we find with enterprises is commonly a mixing of the two classes. Those who prefer PaaS often desire the freedom to drop down to the infrastructure layer when they feel the need for stronger configuration control. The mixing of the two is also highly common in the form of modern applications that mix virtualized workloads with abstracted PaaS executables.
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