PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Battle Lines Are Clearly Drawn

Earlier this week, Heroku, the PaaS player Salesforce acquired during last year’s Dreamforce, announced a major new release Celadon Cedar adding some powerful features targeting enterprise customers. They also announced full Node.js support and added Ruby 1.9.2 support.

Some of the features include:

New process model with support for background processes
Procfiles for having a fine grained control over the processes
Full HTTP 1.1 support
Logplex, support for logs (not just the logs for apps but also for the infrastructure underneath)
Few command line advancements
Automatic language detection upon deployment
Full Node.js support
Ruby 1.9.2 support
Ability to configure language using Procfile
Full process isolation for better security and performance

etc.. In fact, the new features in this release clearly highlights the enterprise focus and Salesforce’s plans for Heroku.

Where are the battle lines then?

Before Salesforce.com acquired Heroku, the main attraction for Heroku platform was with individual developers and startups wanting to get platform power without the capital expenses on the underlying infrastructure. When Salesforce.com acquired them, it was evident that they want to offer enterprise level PaaS that is much more acceptable than Force.com platform. It became evident that Salesforce.com has bigger enterprise platform plans when they announced Database.com. Therefore, some of the features in this release is no surprise for me.

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