Jelastic Brings Together IaaS and PaaS

Seven Criteria for Choosing an IaaS Provider

The way service providers and internal IT organizations think about the cloud is fundamentally different. For service provider, the notion of the cloud evolved around the twin concepts of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The former is all about outsourcing hardware using a shared model that is significantly less costly. The latter is mainly about letting developers build applications on top of shared infrastructure.

Internal IT organizations, however, tend to view the line between IaaS and PaaS as being something of a contrivance. Any time they deploy an application they need access to both the infrastructure and middleware software needed to make it actually run.

However, Jelastic has announced a cloud offering that combines the attributes most often associated with PaaS and IaaS. As a long time provider of PaaS technology that is widely used by hosting service providers, Jelastic CEO John Derrick says it became apparent that enterprise IT organizations didn’t want to have to separately contract for IaaS and PaaS platforms. Jelastic now gives them the option of running its namesake PaaS on-premise or they can contract Jelastic to deploy that PaaS on third-party private cloud or public cloud service.

Derrick says that since it’s apparent that customers will be managing multiple cloud computing scenarios across the enterprise, this is the only approach that really makes sense. Trying to manage multiple IaaS and PaaS service providers only leads to more integration headaches that wind up increasing, rather than decreasing, costs. And unlike other PaaS services, the Jelastic offering is not based on a model that depends on customers who are willing to customize their applications to work on a specific application programming interface (API). As such, Derrick says no hidden lock-in is masked around the Jelastic service. Applications, says Derrick, will run as is on the Jelastic cloud service.

Jelastic currently has relationships with 25 different hosting companies that run its software. IT organizations can mix and match where they want to run the Jelastic PaaS service. At a time when PaaS is finally being recognized as the path to the cloud for the enterprise, Jelastic is simply removing the need to separately contract for all those IaaS services to create a cloud computing platform that actually meets he needs of the enterprise versus the service provider.