Cloud Computing easily understood - PaaS

Platform as a Service is a cloud offering one level higher (see graphic in my first post). No longer am I dependent on the platform offered by an IaaS. I am not required to install databases, web and application servers. Instead I use developer tools provided by the PaaS company to to build applications. These developer tools could be JAVA, .NET, Python, Ruby or several other languages or tools. In my above example, if Tom instead offered Platform as a Service, it would be immaterial to me what server, application and database platform Tom offers. All I need are the development tools offered by Tom, so that I can then build applications, host them at "Tom's PaaS Company" and then offer them to my customers.

Some PaaS providers are:

• Microsoft's Azure platform
• Google's App Engine platform
• Salesforce.com's force.com platform
• Redhat
• Oracle
• Heroku (owned by Salesforce)
• Cloudbees
• Cloudfoundry