In addition to attending the great sessions at the OpenStack Design Conference, our Dell team realized that we’ve been making Platform as a Service (PaaS) much more complex. Stripping away the detritus is important because it looks like “What is a PaaS” is changing on a daily basis so boiling it down to the must fundamental is essential.
At its core, a PaaS is an application that changes its architecture based on the load. That’s it no further definition is required.
I’ve been playing with this definition since April and am finding that it’s a much more productive definition of PaaS than any that I’ve used so far. The reason is that it’s
- application focused,
- not language or services bound and
- captures the business use cases
Of course, I’m going to have to provide more backup in future posts. I want to invite discussion about this perspective on PaaS. I’m especially interesting in seeing how recent offerings from VMware (OpenPaaS/CloudFoundry) or Amazon (Elastic Beanstalk) measure against this concept.
Rob Hirschfeld 