Wednesday, August 28, 2019

The Use and Misuse of PaaS

One of the key advantages of modern cloud systems is that they often come with rapid development platforms that allow the vendor, partners, and even customers to build extensions and customizations to the system without affecting the underlying code or architecture of the base system. These are generally known as Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Examples include the Salesforce Lightning (formerly Force.com) platform, the SuiteCloud platform of Oracle’s NetSuite, Acumatica’s xRP platform, Sage Intacct’s Platform Services, Microsoft’s Power Platform, and many others.

However, as with so many good things in life, PaaS can be used and abused.

Read the rest of this post on the Strativa blog:
The Use and Misuse of Platform as a Service 

2 comments:

Matthew King said...

Hi Frank,

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment on this topic.

It's interesting how the demarcation put in place by Application Platforms (i.e. having alongside a Core System of record) has solved two problems but created three new ones (there might be others also).

The two benefits are:

1) Faster speed of software development.
2) Disentanglement of standard code and custom code (i.e. ongoing ease of enhancement and upgradability).

The three problems introduced are:

a) An Edge System used as a system of record – such as for tracking by serial number as you point out – creates excessive integration complexity; and
b) Performance problems due to data moving between systems – particularly where the Core System is not running in memory – necessitating data replication and persistence in an Edge System; which leads to the next problem.
c) Enlarged data footprint.

In my own experience, having an Edge System serve as a master repository for tracking serial numbers is a massive problem. The integration complexity, compute overhead, and performance bit are diabolical.

But used wisely, Application Platforms help pave a good way out of the legacy application wilderness…

I would also advocate that the simplest Core System, that meets all data intensive business needs, should be chosen. With all the ancillary bells and whistles (err… management fantasies) then built in an Application Platform - without wreaking too much havoc on everyone and everything concerned.

jack said...

Thanks for sharing Article ... you can go thorough out Enterprise Technology Review