In the seeming ever increasing rush towards so-called polyglot PaaS, or PaaS-providers supporting every language under the sun, there has been a single lone voice that has consistently been saying polyglot is a failed methodology. New York based Apprenda makes a .NET PaaS and has long said that only through laser focus on building one specific PaaS for one specific language will enterprises really see the benefits that PaaS promises. Apprenda has somewhat been on the back foot as higher-profile vendors like Heroku and the different CloudFoundry ecosystem players have gained mindshare.
Meanwhile Apprenda has been focused on delivering a highly functional .NET PaaS for its large enterprise customers – this focus on private PaaS has its benefits, after-all enterprises actually pay for stuff, but it’s not a great way to build awareness in the marketplace.
Apprenda is making a move to counter this factor by announcing the availability of ApprendaCloud, a free version of its private PaaS stack that, most importantly, is hosted in the public cloud. This isn’t quite as counter-intuitive as it seems. Apprenda has been fighting hard to get developer adoption, a couple of years ago they released their Apprenda Express product which was a downloadable PaaS product that developers could install themselves. However as Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller tells it, the vast difference between downloads and installs (roughly half of those downloading the product actually installed it) speaks to the barriers to entry that an installed product brings.