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Although the MIT makes the specific point that the Platform Business Model is exactly that – a business model, not a technology – there is naturally a clear and powerful link with the cloud model PaaS (platform as a service).
This offers literally that – a platform as a service – and so it can play a central component part in enabling the Platform Business Model.
Enterprise vs cloud PaaS
Enterprise PaaS refers to the internal application of the platform as a service model, with the goal of boosting software productivity through standardised developer tools and common components.
PaaS can be utilised via public or private Cloud deployment models. Public Cloud services include Microsoft Azure and Google, and vendor software for building your own in-house PaaS includes Cloud Foundry and Red Hat Openshift.
In their paper and ‘PaaS: Open for Business‘, Pivotal describes the essential ingredient:
“Platform as a service is a key enabler of software-driven innovation – facilitating rapid iteration and developer agility. It comprises a set of tools, libraries and services for deploying, managing and scaling applications in the cloud. Adopting an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud PaaS solution frees developers to create game-changing web and mobile applications. It also allows these applications to scale across cloud environments, based on the business need.”
In their report,‘Essential Elements of Enterprise PaaS’, Pivotal lays out a recipe for what constitutes Enterprise PaaS.
From concept to cash
Agile software practices are introduced in the Agile Manifesto, and described here by the Scrum Alliance explaining the relationship to DevOps, the integration of software development and operations management. As the vendor DB Maestro describes in this blog, DevOps builds on the software development best practices like version control and application lifecycle management, with additional functions to further automate the deployment to cloud procedures.
Application performance management provider Stackify makes a great observation that agile and DevOps combine to holistically address the full lifecycle of translating business ideas into working code running in the cloud hosting delivery environment.
Microservices continuous deployment: Infrastructure as code
This integration is conveyed through the idea of ‘Infrastructure as Code’, explained by one of the G-Cloud Digital team Gareth Rushgrove in the Continuous Integration for Infrastructure presentation.
Organisations such as Netflix and Nike aren’t just pioneering new business models, they are also new pioneering new technologies that accelerate these models, new cloud hosting and software design methods like ‘microservices’ and Continuous Deployment.
The cloud is not only changing how software is hosted and executed. It’s also changing how it is written and maintained as well as how it is architected and developed, achieved through DevOps practices and microservices design patterns.
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