VMware Cloud Foundry might be the overall most satisfactory platform-as-a-service offering in the cloud ISV space, according to a new study by the Evans Data Corporation. Those developing for private clouds are favoring IBM SmartCloud, while for public clouds, it’s all about Google App Engine. But overall, it seems to be Cloud Foundry developers who are happiest with their development environment.
The vendor-independent study polled developers who used the various and sundry PaaS offerings on the market on 14 different criteria. Cloud Foundry had the edge in reliability, supplied development tools and price for service and storage, while developers applauded IBM’s security, expertise and auto-scaling. Interestingly, Google won not on its features or services, but rather its market roadmap and vision for the future.
VMware Vice President of Cloud and Application Services Jerry Chen graciously accepted the praise on behalf of the Cloud Foundry team in a prepared statement:
“The ultimate compliment any product can receive is when it comes directly from developers, and that’s why the entire Cloud Foundry team is honored to have been selected as the number one provider for cloud services in the Evans Data user survey. Cloud Foundry was recognized for providing choice with an open PaaS to developers – not only the choice of deployment clouds, but also choice of frameworks and application services. We are pleased to see developers appreciate the open PaaS Cloud Foundry provides.”
It’s interesting that despite all the buzz around Java PaaS solutions such as Cumulogic and Jelastic, it’s still the big guns — VMware, Google and IBM — that are generating the customer satisfaction. Of course, they’re also the ones with the massive marketing budgets, so there is that.
I maintain my position that the PaaS marketplace is headed for a shakeout — some are going to go under or get sublimated. The cloud ISV space may be growing, but it can only support so much.
“I maintain my position that the PaaS marketplace is headed for a shakeout”
I believe that the next wave of shakeout in the PaaS world would be a conversion of DevOps and PaaS together. DevOps tools such as Chef and Puppet integrated into application platforms making it easier to deploy complex applications onto the cloud. In the same way, we’re going to see more Application Platforms adopting the automation and recipe model from the DevOps world into the application platform.
The latter have the potential to transform the opinionated PaaS offerings (CloudFoundary included) as we know them today, with Heroku and GAE leading that trend, into a more open PaaS offering that better fits into the way users develop apps today and giving more freedom to choose your own stack, cloud, and application blueprint.
Cloudify and Amazon Beans Talk is a good reference on that regard.
Nati: It sounds like we’re generally on the same page. The number of cloud players will consolidate even as overall cloud spending grows.
-jp