The rise of the IoT is leading to a mass adoption of platforms as a service (PaaS) cloud computing services.
A report has found that by 2020, over 50% of all applications developed on PaaS will be IoT-centric, "disrupting conventional architecture practices".
According to Gartner‘s "Predicts 2016: PaaS Innovation Continues Unabated" report, most new IoT-centric solutions will be implemented on IoT platforms.
The company said these platforms are a form of multifunctional comprehensive PaaS that is a hybrid, architecturally coherent integration of application platform as a service (aPaaS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), IoT device management, orchestration and business process management services as a platform (bpmPaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS) and analytics services.
Benoit Lheureux, research VP at Gartner, said IoT adoption will drive additional use of PaaS to implement IoT-centric business applications built around event-driven architecture and IoT data, instead of business applications built around traditional master data.
He said: "New IoT-centric business applications will drive a transformation in application design practices that focus on real-time contextually rich decisions, event-analysis, lightweight workflow, and broad access to web-scale data."
The report has also looked beyond IoT adoption, and predicts that through 2018, over 80% of organisations that deploy or assemble self-managed PaaS frameworks will not achieve the expected cloud PaaS experience.
According to Gartner, in the next three years, due to tensions between those in favour of private PaaS and those demanding the full public cloud experience, many self-managed private PaaS initiatives will fail to meet the IT organisation leadership’s expectations of cloud characteristics.
The analyst firm said that as a result, managed private or public PaaS will emerge as best practices.
Yefim V. Natis, VP and Gartner Fellow, said: "Lacking this understanding [in recognition of the essential cultural and organisational changes to IT organisations, as well as technology changes] leads many organisations to stop their PaaS investment at the point of technology deployment, leading to disappointing results down the road."
Elsewhere, Gartner’s paper estimates that more than 70% of IT organisations planning a private PaaS will deploy a container service, rather than PaaS framework software.
According to the paper, an advanced container service provides subscribers with self-service access to container-based infrastructure, that can host, orchestrate, schedule and scale as business needs change.
Other capabilities containers can offer include monitoring, load balancing and securing container communications.
Lydia Leong, VP at Gartner, said: "For advanced technical teams a container service may be better than a PaaS framework for the desired balance between developer productivity, breadth of viable application architectures, IT operations control, and the complexity of implementation."
Lastly, the report found that by 2019, a mandatory capability for the top aPaaS providers will be the delivery of both high-productivity and high-control PaaS options.
