Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as “The Cloud”. When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared Web hosting (but with a cooler-sounding name). For others, it was simply, “let us host your servers in our data center, which we now refer to as a cloud.”
Then, finally, the concept started to solidify into offering specific services or entire software applications as a commodity removed from the server infrastructure. Honestly, I think that was the intent from the beginning, but it took several years before anyone really implemented anything useful in “the cloud”.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is arguably the largest implementation of the “cloud” ideology. I never really had heard of Platform as a Service (PaaS) before reading up on the upcoming IBM webinar here at Linux Journal. (Full disclosure: I'm sure there is a financial partnership of some sort involved with the webinar. I don't know those details; I'm writing because I found it interesting!)
In my day-job situation, I need to deploy a Java-based application for our intranet. Because we don't have a Java application server environment, the biggest chore for me is figuring out what application server or what servlet container to implement. Then I have to configure it, maintain it and keep it updated with both Java itself and the Web server components. That's where PaaS comes in. Instead of buying a software package as a service (SaaS), PaaS allows me to deploy whatever Java applications I want onto a fully installed, maintained and updated Java application server.
The PaaS concept piqued my interest, and perhaps it piques yours. At the very least, it gives more meat to the concept of cloud computing, which is always a good thing. Oh, and for the record? Shared Web hosting was cloud computing long before it was cool—just saying.
View the webinar at XXX.
