Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Development - Cloud Platform As A Service (PaaS)

This post is about the various services available on the cloud for software development. In particular this type of cloud service is called Platform As A Service (PaaS). Typical example of his are:
1. VMware's Cloud Foundry http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/
2. Microsoft's Azure Cloud http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/

Difference between Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) cloud services
The PaaS are different to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) type of cloud, example being Amazon's Cloud Services like EC2 (Elastic Cloud). IaaS requires the user to setup all the infrastructure. As a developer or programmer, that means you need to install your own tools, compilers, IDE, development framework, etc. PaaS on the other hand has the development framework already installed and configured. As a developer, you just need to write code according to the framework and upload it to the cloud to run.

Cloud Foundry
Cost: Free - Open Source Platform
Infrastructure - http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/infrastructure/overview.html
Framework - http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/infrastructure/overview.html Click on the Framework menu item. Currently it supports Java, Node.js, Ruby environments.

Windows Azure
Cost: Paid - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/
Framework - Apparently it is NOT limited to the .Net development environment. The full features are at:
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/features/overview/



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