Overview of Platform as a Service alternatives for .NET developers

1. PaaS alternatives
for .NET
Slawomir Dorzak
@sdorzak

2. What is PaaS?
● Provides ecosystem of services that can be
provisioned using API’s
● Provides API, CLI and IDE integration tools
to provision and maintain application
● Manages and abstracts OS and hardware
layer
● Pay per use / as you go pricing model
● Built-in scalability and elasticity

3. Challenges
● Access to the host OS is often difficult or
impossible
● Debugging can be an issue
● Installing some legacy libraries might be
impossible
● Higher risk of vendor lock-in than just IaaS

4. Apprenda
● Supports both Java and .NET
● Private PaaS solution
● Provides SaaS features

5. Apprenda Logical Overview

6. Cloud Foundry
● Open Source platform (Apache 2.0)
● Started by VMWare (Derek Collison and
Mark Lukovsky)
● Written in Ruby and Go
● Very flexible model - supporting multiple
frameworks and runtimes
● Can be used as a foundation for both private
and public offerings

7. CloudFoundry Overview

8. CloudFoundry
PaaS Layer
IaaS Layer

9. Uhuru
● Private and Public PaaS
● Uses CloudFoundry as a foundation
● Created their own execution agent for .NET

10. Tier3
● Private and Public PaaS
● Targeted at enterprise
● Uses CloudFoundry as a foundation for their
own fork - IronFoundry
● Created their own execution agent for .NET

11. AppHarbor
● like Heroku for .NET
● Built-in CI workflow
● Deploy by doing a git push!
● Debug and production environments
● Big repository f additional services eg.
RavenDB, Sendgrid, Memcached, NewRelic
and much more
● Plans start at free!

12. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
● A lot of control over host OS
● Supports multiple languages and
frameworks including .NET
● Git deploy
● Support for staging and live environments
● VisualStudio integration
● Built-in autoscaling
● Recovers from EC2 failures

13. AWS Elastic Beanstalk

14. Summary
● Windows Azure still the best public PaaS for
.NET
● Few viable alternatives
● CloudFoundry (and derived platforms) - a
good choice if vendor lock-in is an issue
● for private PaaS CloudFoundry based
solutions are worth consideration

15. Resources
● http://pastebin.com/qncD6k56