In previous blogs I have described how organizations are maturing beyond provisioning of individual servers to provisioning of richer cloud-based application stacks.  Known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), this capability takes cloud technology beyond infrastructure to automate the application life cycle.  PaaS allows developers and IT operations to collaborate and ensure that application stacks are consistent and delivered to your customers - within minutes.

Last summer at CiscoLive Orlando, the Application Stack Accelerator for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) was introduced and we quickly noticed that PaaS was an extremely popular topic!   This popularity has grown.  The demand for PaaS is heavy as organizations, probably like yours, look to extend cloud automation to the design, configuration and implementation of the application life cycle.      

Some benefits you can achieve with PaaS include: 

• Application-as-a-service.    PaaS consists of platform technologies that are delivered as-a-service.  Service enablementof these technologies is provided through high levels of abstraction and automation.    Service enablement reduces the complexity of application activities and life cycle that reduces configuration and deployment from weeks or months down to minutes.   

• Infrastructure Independence.  PaaS is designed to run on a collection of servers -usually virtual servers. Virtual servers can reside anywhere in your data center or a 3^rdparty environment due to a lower  dependency of having the supporting infrastructure in the same location.  Infrastructure independenceallows your platform and infrastructure decisions to be made independently of each other without concern for the impact on the systems running PaaS.
• Faster response.Performanceis the hallmark of PaaS.  Automated provisioning reduces the time to design, configure and implement applications while dynamic scalability monitors workload capacity to ensure application SLAs are met.
• Greater efficiency, consistency, and SLA adherence. PaaS deliversefficiencyto IT tasks in multiple ways.  Automated provisioning, configuration-based availability and dynamic scaling work together to eliminate the majority of the heavy lifting required to deploy and manage applications once placed into production.  By automating this series of deployment events, your organization will experience faster development cycles and application delivery with higher levels of quality, reliability and availability. 

In January, as part of the CiscoLive Milan announcement, a stronger partnership between Cisco and Red Hat was announced with several key initiatives being launched to extend OpenStack and enable open, interoperable cloud environments. One of the initiatives mentioned in this announcement was a PaaS offering designed to allow customers to manage both legacy and web-scale cloud environments.  The first fruit of this PaaS initiative is a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) reference architecture that combines Cisco Prime Service Catalog  with the Red Hat OpenShift platform. This reference architecture delivers dynamic scaling, tenant-level security as well as integrated management and provisioning to your applications.

Cisco values the benefits of PaaS and has extended this CVD into a new cloud accelerator for Cisco IAC, clearing the way for developers and IT operations to more easily deploy applications. Cisco Prime Service Catalog is a key component to Cisco IAC providing an end-user self-service portal that allows your customers to consume and manage their applications along with their other cloud-based services. The auto-scaling capability of OpenShift ensures that infrastructure resources are dynamically increased, without operator intervention, safeguarding against any impact to your applications when resource thresholds are achieved.

Attending Red Hat Summit next week? Then be sure to stop by the Cisco (Booth#611)  or Red Hat (Booth#211) for a demo on our new cloud accelerator. Or better yet, attend our two breakout sessions:

Tuesday, April 15^th  Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Red Hat OpenShift
10:40 am

Tuesday, April 15^th  Quantifying the Financial Benefits of PaaS
3:40 pm

Go here to discover all that Cisco will be doing at Red Hat Summit.

Can't attend Red Hat Summit? Then join us on May 13th for a live webinar on the integration between Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Red Hat OpenShift. You can register for this event here.

PaaS technology lets your organization deliver applications with higher quality, availability and consistency.  Cisco Prime Service Catalog and Red Hat OpenShift let you implement PaaS technology on an open source platform delivering a win for developers, IT operations and consumers of your applications.