At this week’s Cloud Connect Summit, a panel of experts from Microsoft, Red Hat, Blue Box and HP discussed cloud computing and the nature of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings. Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich said there are two kinds of PaaS—those that include code with a runtime operating environment and those that allow developers to drop code into a virtual machine.
By contrast, HP’s Margaret Dawson argued that a true PaaS is a complete application development environment with management capabilities.
And Red Hat’s Krishnan Subramanian said that a real PaaS is simply one that allows an application to scale with its platform and infrastructure.