Technology Radar April '16

Many large organizations see the Cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) as an obvious way to standardize infrastructure, ease deployment and operations, and make developers more productive. But it’s still early days, the definition of PaaS remains nebulous, and many PaaS approaches are incomplete or suffer from the immaturity of supporting frameworks and tools. Some PaaS solutions make it harder to do things more easily done with plain Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), such as using a custom Service Locator or complex network topology, and the jury is still out on whether a "Containers as a Service" approach will provide similar value with more flexibility. We see many companies implementing an off-the-shelf PaaS or gradually building their own, with varying degrees of success. We suspect that any PaaS built today will not be an end state but rather part of an evolutionary path. Enterprise migration to Cloud and PaaS, while bringing many benefits, has difficulties and challenges, particularly around overall pipeline design and tooling. Consumers of these technologies should seek the inflection point that indicates "ready for prime time" for their context and should avoid coupling too tightly to the implementation details of their PaaS.

Reactive programming—where components react to changes in data that are propagated to them rather than use imperative wiring—has become extremely popular, with reactive extensions available in almost all programming languages. User interfaces, in particular, are commonly written in a reactive style, and many ecosystems are settling on this paradigm. While we like the pattern, overuse of event-based systems complicates program logic, making it difficult to understand; developers should use this style of programming judiciously. It is certainly popular: We added a significant number of reactive frameworks and supporting tools on this Radar.