Solutions Review

2016 Comparison Matrix Report - Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Introduction:

The enterprise is in the middle of an explosion of growth in mobility and data. The old,
insular model for developing 'in-house' is showing its agein many cases on-premise IT
simply can't keep up. For the last decade, cloud computing has been gaining traction, and
now, it's finally set to surpass on-premise solutions in IT spending.
In the past, enterprise cloud adoption was primarily focused on software as a service (SaaS)
and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, but lately there's been an increasing call for
enterprise adoption of the middle sibling in the cloud family: platform as a service (PaaS).

PaaS is a model of cloud computing in which a vendor provides the user with the hardware
and software tools necessary to create, deploy, and manage applications at scale, via the
internet, as a service.
PaaS eliminates the complexity and cost of buying, configuring, and managing the hardware
and software needed for on-premise application development and reduces time-to-value
compared to IaaS by greatly simplifying configuration and deployment.
But the PaaS landscape is evolving in real timefinding and deploying the right solutions can
be a challenge. At Solutions review, we believe that the best approach to choosing a PaaS
solution is to start with the people who will be using it: your developers. To that end, we've
created the PaaS Buyer's Matrix Report, a visual reference and summary of the top 10 bestof-breed PaaS Solutions.

In this matrix, you'll find the top 10 PaaS solutions: Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft
Azure, Centurylink Appfog, Cloudcontrol dotCloud, Engine Yard, Google App Engine, IBM
Bluemix, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Redhat Openshift, and Salesforce Heroku.
Each solution is compared across five categories specifically designed to help businesses
and developers choose the solution that best fits their needs, whether those needs are a
runtime, software stack, services offered, or macro issues such as data residency.

Features:
This section allows the reader to compare the basic features of PaaS solutions. Use this
section to quickly identify basic qualifiers such as public or private hosting, open source,
method of isolation (containers or virtual machines), number of US and International data
regions, pricing options, and whether or not a free option is available.

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Languages:
These are the runtimes that an application can be written in. This section only includes
languages that are officially supported by the cloud service provider and does not include
runtime support added via community buildpacks. The node.js runtime environment is
included due to its common use for server-side scripting.
Middleware:
Middleware refers to any software component or library which assists with, but is not directly
involved in a task. Essentially, middleware is any software that acts as a liason. For our
purpose, this means web servers such as Nginx and JBoss, and load balancers such as
HAproxy.
Frameworks:
These are software frameworks designed to support the development of websites, web
applications, web services, and resources. This section includes content management PHP
based applications such as Drupal, as well as Java-based frameworks like Grails and Pythonbased frameworks like Flask and Django.
Services:
These are the core native services that are provided by the PaaS vendor as a part of the
offering. This includes memcaching services, document oriented database services, and big
data services such as Apache Hadoop. This section does not include any third-party or add-on
services.

Jeff Edwards
Editor, Solutions-Review.com
A note on extensibility: For simplicity's sake, the Solutions Review PaaS Comparison Matrix only includes runtimes,
frameworks, middleware, and services that are native to, or fully supported by, each solution. However, It must be
noted that 60 percent of the solutions listed are extensible, and can add new runtime and framework support via
community buildpacks at varying degrees of difficulty to the user.
Disclaimer: Information for this report was gathered via a meta-analysis of available online materials and reports,
conversations with vendor representatives, and examinations of product demonstrations and free trials. Solutions
Review does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this publication and does not advice technology
users to base their vendor selection entirely on this research. Solutions Review disclaims all warranties, expressed or
implied, regarding this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Additional Resources:
Explaining the Cloud: What the Heck is PaaS Anyway?
http://solutions-review.com/cloud-platforms/explaining-the-cloud-what-the-heck-is-paas-anyway/
Cloud Computing Glossary of Terms

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review

2016 Buyers Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms as a Service (PaaS)

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review 2016 Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendor Comparison: Features

z
Open Source

Virtual
Machines

Linux
Containers

zzzzz

# of US
Regions

# of
International
Regions

Metered
Pricing

Monthly
Pricing

Free Option

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

Hosting

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Public

Azure (Microsoft)

Public

Centurylink Appfog

Public

CloudControl dotCloud

Public

4 (Google)

6 (Google)

Engine Yard

Public

3 (Amazon)

6 (Amazon)

Google App Engine

Public

IBM Bluemix

Public

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Private

Private

Private

Red Hat OpenShift

Private

Private

Private

Salesforce Heroku

Public

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review 2016 Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendor Comparison: Runtimes

*= Extensible

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

*
Clojure

.NET

Go

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Azure (Microsoft)*
Centurylink Appfog

Groovy

Node.js

PHP

Python

Ruby

CloudControl dotCloud*

Java

Engine Yard

Google App Engine

IBM Bluemix*

Pivotal Cloud Foundry*

Red Hat OpenShift*

Salesforce Heroku*

jRuby

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review 2016 Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendor Comparison: Middleware

*= Extensible

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

Gunicorn

HAProxy

Jboss

Jetty

Nginx

Passenger

Rack

Puma

Tomcat

Unicorn

RA
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Azure (Microsoft)*

Centurylink Appfog

CloudControl dotCloud*

Engine Yard

Google App Engine

IBM Bluemix*

Pivotal Cloud Foundry*

Red Hat OpenShift*

Salesforce Heroku*

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review 2016 Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendor Comparison: Frameworks

*= Extensible

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

CakePHP

Django

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Azure (Microsoft)*

Centurylink Appfog
CloudControl dotCloud*

Drupal

Flask

Grails

Play

Rails

Sinatra

Spring

Pivotal Cloud Foundry*

Salesforce Heroku*

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

IBM Bluemix*

Webapp2

Red Hat OpenShift*

Symfony

Engine Yard
Google App Engine

Merb

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved

Solutions Review 2016 Platform as a Service (PaaS) Vendor Comparison: Services

*= Extensible

CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDER

MySQL

Amazon Elastic Beanstalk

Memcache

MongoDB

NoSQL

PostgreSQL

Azure (Microsoft)*

Centurylink Appfog

CloudControl dotCloud*

EngineYard

Google App Engine

IBM Bluemix*

Pivotal Cloud Foundry*

Red Hat OpenShift*

Salesforce Heroku*

2016 Solutions Review Matrix Report - Cloud Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Redis

RabbitMQ

SQL Server

2016 Solutions Review. All rights reserved