Digital transformation with a lightweight on-premise PaaS

The rise of cloud computing has been enabled by advances in virtualization and containerization technology. Over the past decade, the use of cloud computing has grown rapidly and has had a significant impact on digital transformation with many enterprises migrating to public clouds. While convenient and cost efficient, such approaches are prone to certain data privacy, compliance and security risks. The ongoing democratisation of cloud technologies represented by the increasing number of open source projects, has enabled certain enterprises to easily develop their on-premise cloud infrastructure. However, these open source projects are largely enterprise level and still too complex for small and micro enterprises and academic environments. To further decrease the on-premise infrastructure deployment and management barrier, we first provide an analysis of the existing on-premises PaaS workflows and solutions, along with the complexity of their deployment models, and identify the requirements for simple PaaS solutions for small environments with limited resources. We then introduce Kubitect as an enabler of on-premises PaaS democratization and expedite digital transformation. Kubitect is a lightweight single file declarative infrastructure configuration solution for on-premises cluster definition, instantiation and update. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluation shows the advantage of Kubitect for small environments where simplicity is more important than deploy time, assuming the latter is relatively comparable with alternative solutions.