PaaS the Fastest Growing Cloud Segment

This is something I have written about before, but it seems that the market has finally caught on: PaaS will be the dominant segment throughout 2014. For more information on exactly what the market is and to understand what PaaS means, read this.

Why PaaS? Because the easiest business case for cloud adoption is the area of Software development and operations, called DevOps. The business case is simple and ask anyone who has ever run a data center why. Whenever a new version or release of a piece of code was ready for functional/regression/production test, there needed to be a new environment created for that test. The datacenter guys had to find servers, implement servers, install servers and create a complete environment to complete the test. Once the test was done, the hardware needed to stay untouched, so that a new test (yes, they did find bugs) could be implemented quicker.

The problem here is not only unused hardware and wasted hardware set up skills, but the worst was the time it takes to get a new release out the door.

Cloud and especially PaaS promises to change that forever. Users (SW development guys) can set up an environment on their own as a cloud account, test, and then only use the hardware environment when they need it. As soon as they don't need it, the resources no longer cost money. DevOps is the easiest to understand use of Cloud computing.