PaaS 2.0?

A while ago I has some things to say about people trying to add a version number to SOA. At the time it was 2.0 and I like to think I had a little to do with the fact that it died almost as quickly as it was created. I won't go into details, but the interested reader can catch up on it all later.

Now a friend who got caught in the SOA 2.0 crossfire came to me recently and pointed out that some people are now trying to coin the term 'PaaS 2.0' and asked my opinion. At first I didn't know what to think because the original reasons I was against SOA 2.0 didn't seem to apply here because PaaS is so poorly understood. There are no fundamental architectural principles around which it has grown. There are very few examples that everyone agrees upon. There's not even an accepted definition!

But that's when it hit me! How can you assign a version to something that is so I'll defined? It's not like the Web, for instance, where it made sense to have a 2.0. Ok there's some good stuff from the likes of NIST, but there's no agreed reference architecture for PaaS, so how precisely can you say something is PaaS 2.0? The answer is that you can't. Now that doesn't mean you won't be able to do so eventually, but there are quite a few prerequisites that have to be satisfied before that can occur.

So what does this mean? Am I against PaaS 2.0 as I was with its SOA cousin? Yes I am, but for different reasons. As I outlined above, I think it's wrong to try to version something that it so ill defined. Let's figured out what PaaS 1.0 is first!