Highlights of this post:

• PaaS costs are difficult to predict at scale
• IaaS costs are going down due to improved operational proficiency
• Admin cost differences between IaaS and PaaS are negligible
• PaaS should be less expensive to get better market traction

 

Here’s a handy decoder ring for all the acronyms in this post:

• IaaS = Infrastructure as a Service. On-demand compute and storage typically available as an API call.
• PaaS = Platform as a Service. On-demand turn-key web service that abstracts scaling, and reliability available as an API call.
• AWS = Amazon Web Services
• EC2 = AWS’s Elastic Compute web service
• DIY = Do it Yourself
• DevOps = Developer Operations… a new category for cloud systems management
• GB-month = A pricing mechanism for cloud storage. Amount stored multiplied by hours stored multiplied by unit-cost per month during a billing period.

In the past I have written about the pros and cons facing cloud architects when choosing between an IaaS or PaaS solution for critical application infrastructure. Take a moment and read this post, Balancing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) versus Platform as a Service (PaaS), which focuses on the trade-offs between IaaS flexibility and PaaS’s vendor lock-in. There I briefly mention PaaS pricing challenges, so wanted to expand on that topic with a point of view on how current PaaS pricing schemes hinder adoption.

I’ll put my main theme right out here: Most PaaS solutions have a fundamental problem estimating operating costs at production scale.

There’s an implied “grand bargain” for cloud customers who expect an economic advantage for choosing a cloud PaaS service over a comparable cloud IaaS equivalent. From an anecdotal perspective that seems true. When using PaaS you expect lower people and development costs. PaaS is supposed to provide a price advantage because extensive operational efficiencies are supposed to lower costs. This is because massive physical and human expense are spread across many many customers. It’s a text book example of the “economies of scale.”

But wide-spread PaaS adoption is being hindered because cloud architects can’t wrap their minds around reliable cost estimation. Cost calculators, without real-world at scale metrics, give a false economic security.

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