A pretty simple tweet by Cote, an Industry Analyst at Redmonk, asking for sentiment about using PaaS services got me thinking, and at 4:50pm on a Friday, that’s a dangerous thing!

PaaS (or Platform as a Service), is a great concept in computing, though not a particularly new one – rather than manage all the base operating system, databases, application servers and so on that a modern application relies on, you simply deploy your own custom code to someone else’s pre-built infrastructure. You get all the benefits of low cost commodity computing (if you pick a cheap host..), without the headaches of having to build or operate your own management systems.

However, most of the new PaaS offerings out there seem to simply consist of a provisioning engine deploying your application onto a static set of infrastructure, often hosted on Amazon EC2 or their internal equivalent platform, without offering significant functionality of load balancing, dynamic scaling of resources, database performance options, disaster recovery and so on.

I don’t expect all these things to be free, or even cheap, but you should be able to turn them on and off as and when you need them, and things like disaster recovery plans are not really optional in a world of enterprise computing – simply writing in your DR plan that it’s the responsibility of your application host, and that you have no details of their own plans really won’t cut it!

There’s great new PaaS offerings out there, like Cloud Foundry that I’m a big fan of for rapid application development and deployment, but until the various service providers raise their game in terms of heavy lifting of auto-scaling, DR and so on, then there seems very little point in picking a PaaS service over building your own infrastructure on top of a typical IaaS platform.