PaaS (Platform as a Service) adoption has increased in the last few years. Enterprises were forced to either adapt to the new ways of working or deal with the adverse impact of the pandemic on business. There was an immediate need for digital and online alternatives to resume business operations. The traditional IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) approaches of building servers, configuring foundational services, or installing applications used to take several weeks or months to complete.

PaaS, on the other hand, offers a fully managed platform to build and run applications quickly and make them available to end users. This helps reduce the time to market and resume business operations. Moreover, PaaS also offers much-needed capabilities such as auto-scaling to address unpredictable demand. Since then, PaaS has become the preferred choice for enterprises as an alternative to IaaS and even Lift-and-Shift cloud migrations.

This is also evident from leading analyst firms' global PaaS market growth projections.

Gartner estimates that 95% of the new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms in 2025, up from 30% in 2021.

Another Gartner finding estimates that worldwide public cloud spending on PaaS will surpass $170B in 2024, up from $112B in 2022, with a compounded annual growth rate of more than 24%.

Challenges with the widespread adoption of PaaS

Although PaaS unlocks the exponential value of the cloud, enterprises may face various challenges that limit the large-scale adoption of PaaS solutions. Below are some of the common challenges faced in building and managing enterprise platforms:

• Platform lifecycle management inconsistencies: Different teams across an enterprise use different tools and practices to manage their platforms and PaaS solutions. It gives rise to inefficiencies such as limited automation, knowledge silos and rework by different application and platform teams to solve common problems and configuration issues that make the platform prone to cybersecurity threats. 
    
• Keep up with the pace of innovation: With the growth in cloud services and cloud-native ecosystems, there is a constant need to update existing platforms with security and feature updates along with support for new services and advancements. Recent examples include service mesh for visibility, control of communication between microservices and observability solutions for a unified view of application and platform logs and metrics. Organizations need a solution that can make these innovations available for use by their application teams in a standardized and secure manner. 
    
• Traditional approach of operating cloud-native platforms: Lack of skilled resources results in operational inefficiencies and slower adoption of modern practices like Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) based operations with a strong emphasis on reliability and automation.

To overcome these challenges, enterprises are establishing platform engineering teams and developing IT Service Management (ITSM) extensions to deliver self-service catalog-based experience to their users where application teams request and gain access to standard environments via service requests from portals such as ServiceNow.

This entire workflow is orchestrated using a series of solutions and approaches with a strong focus on utilizing the existing tools and practices.

Essentials of a modern platform

Let’s quickly look at the essentials required in a modern PaaS platform to enhance widespread adoption by enterprises.

1. Service request portal 
   A service request portal offers a web-based interface to application teams across the organization to request infrastructure and PaaS solutions. The majority of enterprises leverage ServiceNow for IT service management, which is generally extended to publish a catalog of new PaaS solutions like the Managed Kubernetes platform. Once the service request is approved, it triggers the execution of associated DevOps pipelines to enable automated platform provisioning.
2. DevOps platform 
   A DevOps platform facilitates the creation of an automation workflow to trigger a series of complex automation scripts in a controlled and phased manner by covering processes such as pre-checks, platform creation, platform configuration, platform-observability, platform-security hardening, platform health checks and notify requestor jobs among others.
3. Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) automation 
   DevOps platform leverages Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automation. IaC is an approach to automated provisioning of infrastructure and platforms by executing the scripts. The infrastructure and PaaS configurations are written in a series of scripts and configuration files. Once executed, provision the entire platform without manual intervention, ensuring consistency across every execution phase by eliminating the disruptions caused by human errors.
4. GitOps 
   Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automates the Day-1 provisioning of the infrastructure and platform. However, it does not ensure that the provisioned environment continues to operate in the desired state. Any manual changes to the provisioned environment override the initial configuration.
     
   GitOps is an emerging approach that introduces an agent to ensure consistency throughout the infrastructure and platform lifecycle. The agent continuously monitors the state of the provisioned environment and compares it with the desired configuration written in IaC configuration files stored in a version-controlled Git repository. Any deviations or drifts trigger the relevant IaC scripts to revert the environment to the desired state. To introduce any changes, platform teams must push new IaC configurations in the Git repository to trigger automated execution.
5. Observability 
   Monitoring and logging solutions help us with 'what' information about an environment. For example: a server performance monitoring tool captures CPU and memory utilization along with many other metrics and alerts when utilization exceeds a threshold. However, monitoring tools are not intelligent enough to address the 'why' part, so the utilization is abnormally high.
     
   With the advancement of PaaS solutions and the rising complexities of modern applications architecture, observability has become an essential component of any enterprise application platform. Observability solutions capture metrics (CPU, memory usage, etc.), logs (Syslog, event log, etc.) and application traces to answer the ‘why’ part. This includes answers to questions such as why the system behaves this way, why the utilization is abnormally high, when the problem started, what changed at a particular time and proactively reporting and remediating the problem with predictive analysis of historical data of metrics, logs and traces.

All these tools, solutions and practices, once integrated, deliver a seamless experience for developers that promotes organizational innovation and sustainable growth and increases productivity.

The final note

At HCLTech, our SREs and platform engineers have extensive experience working with Global 2000 customers to jointly develop and deliver such solutions.

To further streamline the adoption of PaaS solutions and cater to the skyrocketing demand for them among enterprise customers, we have introduced ePACE, our extensible platform automation and configuration engine, which addresses the automation needs of the entire lifecycle of PaaS solutions.

ePACE is based on an extensible framework that supports automating new cloud services and solutions. This unique framework allows operations teams to create and configure automation pipelines for new CNCF tools and ISV solutions.

It delivers 80% faster provisioning of PaaS solutions and enterprise platforms and effortless transition to modern operations by augmenting the capabilities of SREs and PREs with automation tools and dashboards needed for observability, reliability and resiliency of platforms and hosted applications.

If you would like a demonstration of ePACE or to understand how it can help you supercharge your PaaS journey, please write to us at hcbu-pmg@hcl.com.