Productivity vs. Control tradeoffs in PaaS

Gartner published recently an interesting paper: Productivity vs. Control: Cloud Application Platforms Must Split to Win. (The paper requires registration.)

The paper does a pretty good job covering the evolution that is taking place in the PaaS market toward a more open platform and compares between the two main categories: aPaaS (essentially a PaaS running as a service) and CEAP (Cloud Enabled Application Platform) which is the  *P* out of PaaS that gives you the platform to build your own PaaS in private or public cloud.

While I was reading through the paper I felt that something continued to bother me with this definition, even though I tend to agree with the overall observation. If I follow the logic of this paper than I have to give away productivity to gain control, hmm…  that’s a hard choice.

The issue seem to be with the way we define productivity. Read the full detailes here