The other day Krish bemoaned the fact that PaaS is rapidly becoming homogenized as all players rapidly follow their competitors in rolling out features and languages. As Krish said;

…[they] talk about differentiation in terms of user experience. But, ladies and gentlemen, I hear the same from every other PaaS vendor too

I agree with Krish and, given this frame of mind it was a little unlucky for CloudSwing to chose this day to pitch us about the news that their PaaS has gone general availability. CloudSwing is pitching itself as the;

First-ever PaaS for the enterprise with cost tracking and complete customization of technology stacks

The descriptor “first-ever” is a fairly standard item on the press releases I receive – so I wanted to do a little more into CloudSwing. The pitch that CloudSwing gives is that they provide a fully customizable selection of infrastructure, languages and technology stacks, allowing users to chose the combination of components that suite their needs. Alongside this CloudSwing includes built-in “cost management tools” to give visibility over organizational cloud spend.

So – what does this flexibility give? CloudSwing includes pre-built stacks for Java, Ruby, PHP, Javascript with platforms based on Rails, Tomcat, LAMP, node.js, and nginx. Alongside this CloudSwing can be deployed on Amazon or Rackspace and allows mixing and matching of components according to customer’s requirements.

All of which sounds uncomfortably like a relatively standard middleware offering and not so much like the enabling, exciting and automating PaaS we’ve come to know and love. An interesting addition, and one which is somewhat novel, is a built-in cost management offering that gives users visibility over their cloud spend across multiple clouds – this is similar to the functionality offered by Cloudability (see disclosure). I’d be interested to see how wide the functionality of this pend management aspect really is. Finally CloudSwing is integrated with NewRelic to give complete application monitoring to users.

All in all CloudSwing looks both confusing and much like other offerings in the marketplace, which gets me on to a comment raised by a friend opining on the space generally;

I don’t understand why anyone needs another PaaS – it’s gonna be a blood bath next year in the space (analysts are talking of things like “The Coming PaaS World War”)

I can’t help but agree… watch out.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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