Multiple Personalities of Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) | PrudentCloud.

Cloud Computing has slowly but surely seeped into every aspect of technology. All theCloud-in-a-box, not-in-a-box, babble notwithstanding, there has been steady progress made on multiple fronts. With the challenges around Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) all but conquered, technology vendors have firmly and steadily moved up the stack to kill the Platform-as-a-Service(PaaS) monster. In attacking the multitude of challenges and ways to attack them Platform-as-a-Service vendors seem to have taken “There are many ways to skin a cat” adage literally. If you look around you will find scores of vendors attacking the challenge of providing a Platform-as-a-Service, that can meet all the needs of the future enterprise in cloud, from different angles.

While the definition of what constitutes a PaaS is broad and murky, various personalities, diverse at that, seem to have definitely emerged.

Personality #1: Application Development Platform

There is a school of thought that with all the technology advances – extensive self-service, mobile access, social interactions etc, companies will (and must) revisit all their existing applications and in most cases re-write them. Ongoing management of legacy applications is fraught with challenges, be it

• disappearing skill sets (think Cold Fusion developers),
• hardware compatibility issues (think archaic warehouse scanner applications)
• upgrading to new access models like iPhone, Android (think homegrown mainframe COBOL application).

With all the advances in open source technologies, productivity focused technologies like Ruby-on-Rails and abundant skilled labor for the latest technologies, cloud based platforms, now is as good a time as any for rationalizing legacy applications

Continues @http://www.prudentcloud.com

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