Platform-as-a-Service or Development Cloud

Platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, is one of the categories of Cloud Computing; it delivers a fully baked application development environment you can subscribe to and use immediately; with PaaS, developers use free programming tools offered by the service provider to create applications and deploy them in the cloud. The infrastructure is offered by the PaaS provider or its partners, which charge by some usage metric such as CPU use or page views.

This development model is radically different from traditional approaches, where programmers install commercial or open source tools on their local systems, write code, then deploy and manage the applications on their own infrastructures.

Some providers of the most popular developer platforms available today in the cloud are:

Force.com: a platform for building Web applications and hosting them on the Salesforce infrastructure. With Force.com, Salesforce is moving beyond SaaS into the platform-as-a-service market, which could revolutionize the way businesses build and deliver applications to end users and customers. Learn More

Google App Engine: a platform-as-a-service offering that lets developers build applications and host them on Google's infrastructure. Google App Engine supports apps written in several programming languages. With App Engine's Java runtime environment, you can build your app using standard Java technologies, including the JVM, Java servlets, and the Java programming language—or any other language using a JVM-based interpreter or compiler, such as JavaScript or Ruby. App Engine also features a dedicated Python runtime environment, which includes a fast Python interpreter and the Python standard library. The Java and Python runtime environments are built to ensure that your application runs quickly, securely, and without interference from other apps on the system. Learn More

Amazon Web Services: a half-dozen services including the Elastic Compute Cloud, for computing capacity, and the Simple Storage Service, for on-demand storage capacity. In addition to these core offerings, Amazon offers the SimpleDB (a database Web service); the CloudFront (a Web service for content delivery); and the Simple Queue Service (a hosted service for storing messages as they travel between computers). Learn More

Microsoft Azure: a ‘Windows-as-a-service’ platform consisting of the operating system and developer services that can be used to build and enhance Web-hosted applications. Azure is in beta until the second half of 2009. Learn More

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