Now, I am not sure I entirely agree with you

If you look at the middleware space, which is the closest we can look at when it comes to PaaS, the market has gone through tremendous consolidation over the last decade. Take Java, a market that I know a bit, we’ve drifted from about 30 vendors in the early 2000 to less than a handful today (IBM, ORCL, RHT and VMW). Consolidation will happen on that strategic layer, and ecosystems (who are economically not interested in integrating with a dozen vendors, but typically 2-3 at most) will be accelerating that feedback loop.

Now, you are right, PaaS providers will never become the best at providing everything developers need. Much like ISVs are providing best-of-breed certified solutions around/on top of middleware solutions, the same is and will be true in the PaaS space: best of breed “SaaS” providers will complete the base PaaS offering.

Consequently, if by “curated”, it means that those 3rd party integrations will “just work” (i.e. deep integration, well tested, documented, etc.), then I don’t think developers will see a problem with that, au contraire. On there other hand, if “curated” means “protecting a PaaS backyard”, providing limited choice and limited ability to extend a PaaS in a self-service fashion, then I don’t see this fly with developers.

So I don’t think that the freedom to extend a PaaS without constraint and the notion of “curated environments” are at odd.

Cheers,

Sacha Labourey
CloudBees, Inc.