Furthermore, the actual PaaS market segment is still quite young, chaotic and highly fragmented, dominated by a few providers which use and promote incompatible standards and formats. This introduces adoption barriers due to the lock-in issues that prevent the portability of data and software from one PaaS to another, “locking” software developers to the first provider they use. Developers indeed require more flexibility. They do not only need to deploy applications into a specific Cloud platform, but also to migrate applications from one platform to another, as well as to distribute related applications across multiple PaaS.

 

Even on the vendor side, the very same “lock-in” is greatly limiting the entry of new PaaS providers with innovative offerings, due to the high switching costs that their competition’s customers have before them.

 

The current state of the PaaS landscape is therefore far from a global arena open to every player. Reducing the interoperability and portability barriers between different vendors constitutes an important step for realizing the potential of an open market global vision for Cloud computing and their platforms. This is the target of the Cloud4SOA European research project.