‘Tis the season of light. With Diwali recently concluded, we’ve now entered the days of the Hannukah Festival, the Advent Season, the Nativity Fast, and in the Philippines, the onset of Simbang Gabi (“Night Mass”), a series of evening services as Christmas approaches. The Yule log is also burning metaphorically if not literally throughout much of the Western world. All center on the presence of light.
As we enter the new year, fireworks will be obstreperously on display throughout the world, with the global light show extending into the Chinese New Year (literally, “Spring Festival”) in February. Meanwhile, the Ayat an-Nur (“Verse of Light”) burns for many throughout the year.
Overcoming darkness is a basic instinct of humans, reflected in a variety of ancient traditions, festivals, and holidays. Even people who aren’t afraid of the dark get gloomy in the prolonged absence of sun, moreso for those in northern climes who are now seeing their days shrink to precious few hours.
Overcoming the darkness of human poverty and violence thus seems a worthy topic this time of year, as much of the world enters a contemplative time devoted to celebration, family, and vows of renewal for the upcoming year.
Which leads us inevitably, of course, to PaaS.
Background
Work we’ve been conducting at the Tau Instittute for Global ICT Research over the past three years shows a strong correlation – if not outright causation – between aggressive ICT development and socioeconomic success.
We measure ICT development on a relative, income-adjusted basis, and have found South Korea, New Zealand, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands, and Canada to be among our world leaders. Nations throughout the development continuum including Poland, Vietnam, Uruguay, Chile, Jordan, Morocco, and Ghana also show promise.
We believe that a fundamental and continuous commitment to ICT development is the best antidote to poverty and its attendant problems. The issue of violence is often separate, of course, but we believe a strong commitment to socioeconomic development among all nations of the world can grind away at resolving particular issues of violence as well.
Three Big Things
That commitment to ICT encompasses three big things—bandwidth, cloud computing, and PaaS. The first of these is obvious—bigger pipelines mean more information can be directed to all devices, whether datacenters, personal computers, or handheld devices. To take best advantage of bandwidth means efficient computing—and cloud computing continues to promise a much more effective use of all the iron being put into place.
The third leg of the stool is effective development of applications and services to make use of the iron and pump information through the pipelines. This is where PaaS comes in.
It’s an ungainly term, PaaS, and one that may go away some day soon. But it can light the road to development of the applications, services, and systems that will improve the lives of people throughout the world.
Global Phenomenon
During my time in the Philippines, I saw an actively engaged development community of (mostly) young people who were developing mobile apps that did everything from finding lower cost gas stations to bringing basic education to remote province villages to providing imminent flood warnings during that country’s notorious typhoon season. All done on one PaaS or another.
In the US, at the recent Cloud Expo/ThingsExpo in Santa Clara (for which I served as Conference Chair), I witnessed two happenings–the ElasticBox Hackathon and IBM Bluemix Developer Playground—that focused developers’ energy on solving problems in education, transportation, and health care.
In Africa, recent events in Johannesburg and Lagos focused on cloud computing and development, as well as the DevOps approach to development, with an emphasis on solving issues of poverty, government transparency, and private-public partnerships.
PaaS encompasses platforms that provide ways to develop, test, and deploy services quickly, and which work within the virtualized or specifically allocated world of provisioning provided by on-site and/or third-party cloud resources.
I’m presently enamored of Cloud Foundry and its growing community and influence; you no doubt have your own preferences and recommendations. Please feel free to send me your stories.
More than mere points of light, the presence and use of PaaS worldwide is the initial step in the long march toward improving lives and societies at all levels of development.