Today I received an message through LinkedIn from a BizTalk colleague in the field Jonathan Gurevich about Cloud Platforms. I got this message from him concerning my blog post Window Cloud. David Chappell has written a whitepaper ‘A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms’. In this paper I saw terms like on-demand platform and platform as a service (PaaS). Last one a new acronym to be added to a already existing long list. I looked at Wikipedia and it is defined there:
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an outgrowth of the Software as a Service application delivery model. The PaaS model makes all of the facilities required to support the end-to-end life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users. It’s also known as cloudware.
And of course there are people that like to define it themselves and/or explain it very well too like Alex Barnett. Or Salesforce a CRM in the cloud even called PaaS next version of Web: Web 3.0.
Back to the paper itself. There are three kinds of cloud services as David puts it. Software as a Service, Shared services and Platforms. Each can be found in the cloud and on-premises. This is explained in the paper. Futhermore cloud platforms are examined with focus on cloud foundation, infrastructure services and application services. I suggest go red and those of you that are going to attend PDC: it is a good primer to put Windows Cloud in context.
Technorati: 
PDC 2008
Software As A Service
Platform as a service
Software plus Services
