PaaS may be a panacea for stressed-out developers, survey says

Platform as a Service (PaaS) -- essentially, cloud for developers -- is looking better and better in an era in which developers are being hard-pressed to turn applications around within a very short window. Over the past year, PaaS has been catching on like wildfire.

A new survey of 700 IT leaders, sponsored and released by Progress, finds 70% are either already using PaaS solutions for application development or are planning to use them the future. However, only 18% have been using PaaS for longer than one year, suggesting uptake is relatively recent, the report finds.

PaaS provides access to development tools, platforms, databases and middleware from the cloud, either via public services (such as Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace) or on top of internal private clouds (such as those built on OpenStack or Eucalyptus.)

Advantages or benefits PaaS has provided users include a reduction in timescales (54%), reduced costs for development (51%) and even an increased capacity for innovation (47%), the survey finds.  Businesses are planning to invest about $260,653 this year, on average, in PaaS, the survey also reports.

The arrival of support in the form of PaaS couldn't come a moment too soon. Respondents report that on average, organizations expect up to three new applications a year, and it takes an average of six months to develop and deploy each new application.

Most respondents (85%) report demand within their organizations to develop and deploy new applications more quickly. A large proportion, 43%, say that the pressure is top-down, i.e. from the C-suite/board level, followed by sales and marketing departments.

PaaS also plays a role in assisting with API development or management. Over half of those currently using PaaS have already deployed an API management platform, compared with just 16% without.

PaaS users also show a greater propensity to explore the use of new languages. Around half (52%) of respondents say that their organization will be beginning to use new languages over the next three years. This rises to three quarters among PaaS users.

(Thumbnail photo: Michael Krigsman.)