PaaS is a commodity now, what's next?
I was spending couple of evenings last week looking for alternative to Heroku that is hosted in Germany. Heroku is an absolutely awesome Platform as a Service (PaaS). We at elastic.io are using it (and paying for it) last two years and very happy with value it provides, however after the NSA scandal we are getting more and more questions about data protection and where our servers are physically located (note: we are a German company and Germany has the best data protection laws in the world).
While looking onto the PaaS alternatives I suddenly found many different open-source PaaS platforms like Cloud Foundry, Dokku, Deis, Flynn which is actually a strong indication of a simple fact - Platform as a Service is a commodity. Almost all of these products (may be except Cloud Foundry) are young open source projects, however based on my superficial view deliver similar set of features one would expect from PaaS.
This is actually good news for PaaS users - as typical PaaS feature-set is obvious now commoditization and open source products will lead to more players on the market, more competition and lower prices. At the same time it is a bad news for Heroku (or better to say Salesforce) and other players on PaaS market (like CloudBees, CloudControl, and many others) - commoditization, increased competition and lower margins will push PaaS players into different higher-margin areas.
According to Gartner report on aPaaS many of PaaS vendors them realized it and started to add new products/features to the PaaS platforms - like plug-ins/add-ons marketplaces, synchronization / data integration and  RAD tools.
So, that's the question -Â What do you think will be the next feature/add-on you will expect to see from your PaaS Vendor? Will it be yet another Database or a piece of middleware, or may be API Management / API Enablement tool? I would be very interested to hear what do you think. Tell us what you think on HN or in Dusqus discussion feed below.
















