At their 2014 Cloud Customer Summit, CenturyLink VPs Jonathan King (Cloud Strategy & Business Development) and David Shacochis (Cloud Platform) joined up with The New Stack Analysts co-hosts Alex Williams and Donnie Berkholz to record this episode, in which they look back at and explore topics that were first raised in previous episodes.

The reflections begin with Show 2, "The Rise of Microservices in the PaaS World," which was recorded at GlueCon 2014, with Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller, Digital Ocean's Jeff Lindsay, as well as Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale, and Donnie Berkholz.

"That was an interesting time (May 2014)," Alex recalls, a time to observe "where the market was starting to head, not just for Cloud Foundry or OpenShift, but this whole new breed of homegrown Platforms-as-a-service that we're starting to see now." Alex mentions a couple of examples. "Deis is a Platform-as-a-service that relies heavily on Go and CoreOS. And, Digital Ocean is building out its own Platform-as-a-service that's essentially built on Go."

Jonathan mentions CenturyLink's own journey to the PaaS world with their acquisition of AppFog and its subsequent integration into the native IaaS environment. He elaborates on a central question raised during the podcast: "Is IaaS becoming PaaS; is PaaS becoming IaaS; is there still a distinction?" Jonathan wonders about Alex's and Donnie's current perspectives on this subject.

"The elephant in the room is AWS," asserts Donnie, "adding more and more higher-level services." Customers want more transparency out of the PaaS layers, says Donnie, as well as wanting more exposure and flexibility, "such as being able to compose one's own PaaS on top of an IaaS and pulling in services that are interesting."

Alex suggests that companies such as SalesForce, now taking a "mobile app developer approach" and "looking to bring this generation of developers, or quasi-developers, into the landscape," are leveraging PaaS/SaaS combinations. This new kind of developer may be more comfortable working with drag-and-drop tools than with working at the command line, he says. The evolution toward "this quick-and-easy way to build apps," a trend which The New Stack is seeing and covering, "totally abstracts the infrastructure itself." Alex wonders what these changes will mean for Back-end-as-service, and what existing or future services will actually constitute the back end.

Dave points out that the PaaS layer relies on external services, such as for data storage, and that running a PaaS necessitates having a viable ecosystem strategy, and he finds it interesting how an add-on engine can bind-in and orchestrate external services either at the PaaS layer or at the IaaS layer.

Of "What Comes with API Ubiquity" (Show 6), Alex says the show deals with a concept he has been thinking on for some time: what does it mean to run a new stack business these days?

"We're seeing heavy adoption of SaaS technologies for financial management (by the executive wing)," he offers as an example, saying that CEOs "have to think about data in a whole different context than they did before," and that companies "are having to think much more about these business questions that go with the ecosystems and these platforms."

"An ecosystem should surprise you," says Dave. "There needs to be some ambient creativity in that ecosystem that's coming at your platform and doing things that maybe you didn't envision, sort of the 'wildflower syndrome.'"