Runtime Languagesβeta

Live statistics of the PaaS vendor landscape 1 .

Language-specific vs Polyglot PaaS

When PaaS first started, a lot of offerings did only support one specific language. This has changed dramatically over time. Most of today's PaaS support way more than one language. While a specialization on one language (Language-specific PaaS) may result in better and more specialized support of that language, more languages (Polyglot PaaS) attract a larger mass of customers and allow more flexibility for developing in different languages while sticking to one particular PaaS provider. The mean amount of supported languages is 4.9.

Language and Version Support

Today's PaaS support a variety of different runtime languages as basis for customer applications. Currently, PaaS offerings officially support a total of 22 different languages. The Top 5 languages based on support percentage are Java Php Ruby Node and Python. The following chart shows the support percentage of all available languages. A click on the language bars drills down on the different available language versions.

Extensibility as a key part of a modern PaaS

Another key part of a modern PaaS is extensibility. Currently, 63 % of the vendors are extensible. Originally developed by Heroku, buildpacks are a collection of scripts that define a generic API for detecting, compiling and releasing e.g. runtime languages or frameworks. Buildpacks enable the developers to add own packages of services or runtimes to their PaaS environment. Other vendors have either adopted Heroku’s buildpacks or defined their own extensibility mechanisms. This capability gives the developers greater freedom and possibilities to configure the system, blurring the differentiation to IaaS.
1 The data source is the most recent collection of PaaS Profiles.