William Vambenepe compares enterprise application development to cooking. Things always go best in the kitchen if you use the right tool for each job, but it sometimes seems more practical to reuse a tool that’s already handy or already dirty than to go to the trouble of getting out the right tool. In the same way, software development works best if you use the right tool for each job, but sometimes enterprises skimp on purchasing tools because they believe the cost of implementing and managing the tool will outweigh the value of the tool.
Vambenepe contends that platform as a service (PaaS) offerings will change this reality in the near future. “The next leap in making it practical to always use the right tool for the job will come with PaaS,” he writes. “As PaaS matures, PaaS environments will be those in which users (almost) HAVE to use the right tool; where they’ve lost all the excuses (both of the valid and the imagined kind) for not using (or at least trying out) the full richness of runtime and management tools. That’s because the underlying Cloud operating system is built from the ground up to host these various platform services and present them in a unified way not just to the application running on top but also to the administrators in charge of maintaining them.”
