The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market is going through metamorphosis. A key driver of this change is the container revolution, led by Docker. Every PaaS vendor in the market has refactored its platform for containers. On the other hand, the combination of orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker, is becoming an alternative to traditional PaaS. The line between container orchestration and PaaS is getting blurred. For enterprises and decision makers considering PaaS, the current market landscape looks complex and confusing. Amidst all this chaos, one vendor who is quietly redefining PaaS is Amazon Web Services.
Having invested heavily in the core building blocks of infrastructure – compute, storage, and networking; Amazon has been steadily moving up the stack to focus on platform services. From its vantage point, AWS has visibility into top customer use cases and deployment scenarios. By carefully analyzing what customers run in its infrastructure, AWS is building new managed services that are quickly becoming an alternative to self-hosted workloads. Amazon RDS, AWS Directory Services, Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon WorkMail, Amazon WorkDocs, and Amazon EC2 Container Service are a few examples of these services. AWS wants customers to sign-up for its managed services instead of following the DIY approach. In its current form, AWS can support everything a small and medium business needs. From hosted desktops to file sharing to collaboration to backup and archival, Amazon has it all. Beyond enterprise and business applications, it is now eyeing developers by offering a parallel universe of application lifecycle management in the cloud. The new family of code management services such as AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, handle the entire lifecycle of a cloud-native application. Amazon is in the process of building a brand new PaaS that is very different from the rest.
Amazon API Gateway – an application programming interface management layer – is the latest addition to the AWS application services portfolio. Though it might just look like another service from AWS, this has the potential to become the cornerstone of AWS’ PaaS strategy. Amazon is calling this service the “front door” for applications to access data, business logic, and functionality from back-end services. API Gateway is another classic customer workload that became a managed service on the AWS cloud. So, how does this service enable Amazon to disrupt the PaaS market?
Last year at the AWS re:Invent Conference, Werner Vogels unveiled a killer microservices platform called AWS Lambda. In a Gigaom Research report entitled Why AWS Lambda is a Masterstroke from Amazon, I analyzed the importance of this service. What’s special about Lambda is that it is a true NoOps platform. Developers bring their autonomous code snippets that get invoked by an external event. Since its inception, AWS has been regularly adding Lambda hooks for popular services like S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, and SNS. It recently added Java language and JDK to this microservices platform. Though it was tempting to port the bulk of the business logic and workflow from monolithic apps to AWS Lambda, the service didn’t support exposing the code snippets as REST endpoints. Developers had to rely on service hooks to indirectly trigger Lambda functions.
One of the most powerful aspects of the new Amazon API Gateway, is its integration with AWS Lambda. Developers can upload code snippets to Lambda and expose it as a standard REST endpoint hosted by the API Gateway, which essentially becomes the facade to the microservices platform. This service eliminates the need to spin up an EC2 instance that runs business logic exposed as an API. What’s more? Developers can point and click to configure an API key, throttling, bursting, caching and even adding a custom domain. Finally, they can also generate native SDKs of their APIs for Android, iOS, and JavaScript. This combination of AWS Lambda and API Gateway becomes a powerful microservices platform without the tax of scheduling, orchestration, monitoring, logging and security. Both API Gateway and AWS Lambda are elastic, enabling the developer to focus on the logic and code. Through the integration of CloudTrail and CloudWatch, performance metrics and logs are instantly available. Microservices hosted in AWS Lambda can consume AWS SDK to communicate with other services such as Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB. This deployment topology makes applications highly available, scalable and secure with no operations required. Deploying the same applications on a traditional PaaS involves quite a bit of configuration and management.
But API endpoints and code do not make an application complete. It needs an interface to become web applications and mobile apps. Since the heavy-lifting is offloaded to AWS Lambda, all that the developer needs to do is to host the web application that consumes the API exposed by the API Gateway. This is where Amazon S3’s web hosting feature comes in handy. Designers and developers can build beautiful web interfaces based on Bootstrap, AngularJS, or other JavaScript frameworks. Since API Gateway supports the generation of JavaScript SDK, it can be consumed in static web applications hosted in Amazon S3. The same API can be targeted by native Android and iOS applications. For authentication and security, the application can be integrated with Identity and Access Management (IAM). This configuration completely avoids the need to spin EC2 instances dedicated to hosting applications. The combination of S3, API Gateway, and AWS Lambda delivers scale without the need for administration.
Amazon’s microservices-based PaaS expects developers to bring just code and data. When PaaS was envisaged in 2008, its promise was to enable developers to focus on code and data without worrying about infrastructure. Even in its latest avatar, PaaS hasn’t been able to deliver this promise.
There may be concerns about vendor lock-in. But remember, there are cloud-native and web-scale startups exclusively building their applications on AWS. Parse, one of the most popular mobile backends, acquired by Facebook, still runs on AWS. With a few pennies for millions of API calls and hundreds of invocations, Amazon’s PaaS is the most attractive platform for startups. It reduces the time to market from months to days.
Amazon’s aggressive push impacts everyone in the PaaS and BaaS markets. Existing vendors need to evolve to make it easy to deploy and manage microservices.
The roadmap for Amazon’s PaaS is well laid out. AWS teams are busy integrating the platform with one of its recent acquisitions, 2lemetry, an IoT PaaS startup. Eventually, AWS PaaS will support IoT specific protocols such as MQTT, CoAP, and STOMP. API Gateway and Lambda will play a significant role in the IoT PaaS. Developers will be able to connect the dots for ingesting, streaming, querying, storing and analyzing sensor data without writing complex code.
