Why Labels Like “PaaS” and “Kubernetes Platform” Fall Flat in the Real Enterprise

Red Hat doesn’t want to call OpenShift a PaaS.

And honestly? Most of the enterprise buyers I talk to in the Buyer Room don’t care what it’s called either.

They’re not asking whether something is a PaaS, CaaS, KaaS, or even an “AI platform.” They’re asking:

• Will this help my developers ship faster?
• Can I support hybrid deployments without rebuilding everything twice?
• How much effort does it take to make this usable?

The distinction between “PaaS” and “enterprise Kubernetes platform” might matter to Red Hat’s product marketers—but in practice, it creates confusion rather than clarity. Because whatever you call it, the expectation is the same: a platform that enables teams to build and run applications without having to hand-stitch the entire stack.

PaaS: The Label That Vendors Run From, But Buyers Still Use

Red Hat avoids the PaaS label because it implies simplicity, lack of control, and maybe even “Heroku” in people’s minds. Fair. OpenShift is more capable than that.

But in trying to avoid that connotation, they’ve drifted toward vague terms like “hybrid application platform” or “Kubernetes-based developer experience.” It sounds more enterprise-y, but it tells buyers very little.

Meanwhile, platform teams still use the word PaaS to describe what they’re trying to build: a curated, secure, self-service layer that gives developers velocity without dragging ops into every release.

If your product delivers that—even if it runs on Kubernetes, supports GPUs, and scales to edge—you’re in the PaaS business, whether you like it or not.

What Buyers in the Room Actually Say

In candid conversations inside the Buyer Room, I hear things like:

• We need to give devs something Heroku-like—but secure and on-prem.
• I don’t want my team spending six months wiring up notebooks and pipelines.
• Our CFO doesn’t care if it’s CaaS or PaaS—they care how much it costs to get one more app into production.

The taxonomy doesn’t help. The outcomes do

The Takeaway for Vendors

You don’t need to call your product a PaaS. But if you’re marketing to platform teams or enterprise architects, stop obsessing over the label and start showing how you:

• Reduce platform engineering lift
• Improve developer experience
• Align with internal governance and security
• Scale across hybrid environments without needing a separate ops team per location

If that’s what your platform does, then congratulations—you’ve built a modern PaaS. Now tell that story.