Infrastructure abstraction solves many problems for modern digital ecosystems, including integrating with the latest technologies, scaling up for the global market, speeding up deployments, and more. Platform as a service (PaaS), an essential element of this abstraction, becomes increasingly crucial for innovations in 2025 and beyond. Gartner affirms this postulate by suggesting a 21.6% growth in spending on PaaS in 2025. Interestingly, since its rise, Kubernetes has been challenging the presence of PaaS in digital offerings by offering a more viable alternative to its benefits.
Kubernetes users have reported faster deployment and scaling time than popular PaaS tools. Moreover, the concerns related to vendor lock-in and costs have also given PaaS a bad rap over time. Kubernetes, an open-source tool effective with microservices architectures, has increasingly gained trust from businesses across industries.
In this blog post, we discuss the place PaaS essentially finds itself in when Kubernetes is ruling digital ecosystems with its numerous benefits.
PaaS, K8s, and the Fight for Relevance in Cloud Native
PaaS gained popularity thanks to its benefits in simplifying infrastructure management. It's been helping DevOps teams with abstracted infrastructure resources, accelerated deployments, and faster development cycles. Tools like AWS Beanstalk, Heroku, Google App Engine, and more have helped developers strategize their CI/CD processes without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. However, the rise of containerization and Kubernetes changed that, especially for cloud native environments. With the rise of Kubernetes, managing distributed cloud-native applications became more controllable. This gradually forced PaaS tools to readjust their presence in the infrastructure management space. Here’s why:
- Better Infrastructure Management: K8s offers better control over infrastructure resources for networking, storage, DevOps workloads, and more. It served automated load balancing, self-healing capabilities, customizable configurations, and more such benefits that outshone PaaS.
- Better Support for DevOps and CI/CD: Kubernetes gave rise to tools like Helm, AgroCD, Tekton, and more that simplified CI/CD management and deployments among other DevOps workflows. This was a step from PaaS, especially with more mature DevOps practices that encouraged customization, scalability, and infrastructure-agnostic processes.
- Improved Scalability and Optimization: Although PaaS tools offered sophisticated auto-scaling and performance optimization features, Kubernetes went a step ahead. Horizontal and Vertical Pod Scaling (HPA and VPA), reduced resource wastage, and offered better control over scaling options.
- Evolution of Cloud Native: The cloud-native architecture itself evolved to favor Kubernetes more. With microservices and containerization gaining popularity for their decoupled modules and event-driven architectures, K8s became a better option for infrastructure management than PaaS.
Why Return to PaaS?
The question then comes—why has AI PaaS been gaining headlines recently? Why does Gartner still suggest appreciable growth in PaaS spending? Why are s in recent times? Why do HPE and NVidia go through the trouble of evolving PaaS for GenAI development?
Here are some points that can help answer these questions:
Working with AI
Kubernetes has the upper hand in deploying and scaling AI models. However, the cruciality of PaaS lies in its out-of-the-box support for AI solutions with pre-trained models, APIs, managed ML pipelines, and more. PaaS tools help simplify AI frameworks with one-click fine-tuning of models, support for MLOps, data preprocessing, and more.
Handling Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Even with limited benefits for cloud-native architectures, when compared to K8s, PaaS is undeniably involved in working with complex environments like multi and hybrid clouds. It comes as a reliable option when dealing with cross-cloud networking and serverless architectures, and it benefits from secure service-to-service communication, pre-configured networking, and more.
Security Management
Alone, neither Kubernetes nor PaaS can effectively handle modern cyberattacks like supply chain attacks, data breaches, and more. Kubernetes can help with enforcing security policies in distributed environments. However, PaaS has more concrete offerings to handle real-time security issues with pre-configured security controls, automated security patching, vulnerability scanning, and more.
What does the Future Hold?
The way PaaS is redefining its utility for our digital ecosystems, one thing seems clear - Paas and Kubernetes need to work together. While K8s is the backbone of modern DevOps, its steep learning curve needs a friendly ally like PaaS to offer simplified features when required.
Here’s how the future of PaaS and K8s in 2025 and beyond seems to manifest this partnership:
- Enhancing Kubernetes Strengths: Working together, Kubernetes and PaaS can ease the learning curve for Kubernetes. PaaS tools offer pre-built configurations that simplify K8s tasks like cluster provisioning, service discovery, ingress management, and more. This essentially empowers Kubernetes to offer easier workload management to DevOps teams.
- Simplifying Deployment Processes: Here again, PaaS’s ability to simplify build and deployment in CI/CD pipelines makes it a helpful partner for K8s offerings like Helm Charts. Users can abstract infrastructure resources using PaaS without knowing about Docker images and other complexities. PaaS can help automate container deployments by further abstracting the infrastructure provisioning.
- Offering Better Monitoring Features: Kubernetes needs tools like Prometheus to perform monitoring tasks like logging, distributed tracing, metric collection, and more. PaaS tools can offer additional, more nuanced features like built-in tracing, error reporting, AI-driven anomaly detection, and more. This makes their partnership more effective for complex real-world applications and platforms of our times.
Conclusion
Although Kubernetes seems to have shrunk the space occupied by platform-as-a-service in the infrastructure space, modern-day digital ecosystems want them to work in tandem. Developments are being made to empower PaaS with the latest technologies to help Kubernetes further simplify our real-world innovations. PaaS can become an indispensable ally for container orchestration technologies in 2025 and beyond by defining a suitable scope and laying out thoughtful strategies.
