Best Practices for a Private PaaS Implementation

Usually customers have come to us after trying to build their own private PaaS from scratch or from using a variety of open source components, However, for a wide variety of reasons, it doesn’t quite materialize the way they originally hoped. As a result, the focus for companies shift from developing their own PaaS to purchasing one and integrating it into their organization.

When looking to incorporate any enterprise system, it requires the proper planning and resources in order to make it successful. Companies need to consider the organizational, process and technical layers involved. This includes establishing a program strategy, developing clear business objectives and assessing their application portfolio. One of the key considerations in the implementation of a private PaaS is having an understanding of how the architecture and workflow will impact the existing infrastructure.

Architectural Considerations for your Private PaaS Implementation

When implementing a private PaaS, you need to design an architecture for each environment (development, testing, staging, and production) that is right for your workflow and applications. There are a few key considerations when planning how to distribute roles among the VMs in your Stackato cluster when doing this:

• Distributing load: whether or not there are sufficient routers, and application instances to support the expected and unexpected load
• Minimizing single points of failure: building active-active redundancy in the system architecture
• Persistent or Block Storage: back the relevant roles with block storage to leverage storage technologies and solutions
• CPU and memory utilization: ensure that the DEAs have sufficient resources to take on the deployed application instances

You need to know your applications well in order to plan for an architecture that suits the type of applications you intend to deploy. While your individual setup will vary depending on the number of clusters your enterprise requires, getting the architecture right is an important step in a successful implementation of private PaaS.

For more information about implementing a private PaaS in your enterprise, download the white paper “Best Practices for a Private PaaS Implementation” written by ActiveState and Cloud Technology Partners.