Essentially, you turn on a swarm and then ... oh, I still need routing. And service injection. And I need something to build the app. Something to hold the images. I guess I need standard debugging interfaces. Standard performance measurement. And ... and ... and ...
PaaSes require a lot of engineering.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal on the fringes of one such PaaS, Cloud Foundry.
There's quite a few options in this area. I've recently started using dokku for personal projects. My current plan is to migrate to deis in future if/when I want multiple nodes.
one question - there have been a few open source PAAS out there for a while. But no real competitor to Heroku till now. What's missing ?
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder
Cloud Foundry predates pretty much everything else. It was decided in the early days to support the full buildpack lifecycle as defined by Heroku, to the point that a lot of Heroku buildpacks run on Cloud Foundry with no or minimal changes.
Disclosure: I work on buildpacks for Pivotal, the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
This is where I want to see docker go, being able to handle zero downtime deployment without pain, good luck!
I hear similar questions about Cloud Foundry: "why did you write Diego instead of using Kubernetes?" -- because Kubernetes didn't exist. "Why BOSH instead of Terraform?" -- Terraform didn't exist (and has different opinions, anyhow). "Why Garden instead of Docker?" -- Docker just didn't exist. And so on.
I call it NIYS: Not Invented Yet Syndrome.
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, which donates the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry.
AWS is IaaS. AWS does offer some 'PaaS' experience through the offerin go ElasticBeanstalk and ECS. But neither came close to a true PaaS.
(Also I work at HubSpot where Singularity was developed)
And yes, I looked at the link. It uses "PaaS" without defining it.
