The definition of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and how the cloud computing paradigm are evolving seem to be in the eyes of the beholder, according to members of a panel of cloud vendors at the Cloud Connect Summit, which was co-located with the Interop conference.
Mark Russinovich, a technical Fellow at Microsoft, said he sees different types of PaaS platforms: compute PaaS offerings that include code with a runtime operating environment and PaaS platforms that simply enable developers to drop code into a virtual machine.
For Margaret Dawson, vice president of product marketing and cloud evangelist at Hewlett-Packard Cloud Services, the concept of a PaaS is all about providing a full application development environment that also includes management capabilities.
Jesse Proudman, founder and CEO at Blue Box, said PaaS is all about providing a service catalog of consumable services, which could include application delivery or database capabilities. PaaS is a layer of abstraction that can enable workloads to move from cloud to cloud, he added.
Krishnan Subramanian, director of OpenShift strategy at Red Hat, has a simple litmus test of defining what is and what isn’t a PaaS. With a true PaaS, an application can scale with a platform and the underlying infrastructure, he said.
Read the full story at eWEEK:
Interop Panelists Seek to Define PaaS, Comment on Its Outlook
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.