In the last post, we talked about how the ultimate nirvana is for the business to do self-service provisioning of services from a service catalog. This is somewhat easy to think about when we consider compute, storage and network services – the virtual bare metal gets provisioned within a short period of time and is made available for the user. The SLAs are typically around uptime, recovery point objective (RPO) during failure, recovery time objective (RTO) after failure, etc. This concept becomes more interesting when we talk about PaaS.

The Platform in PaaS refers to a set of capabilities that start with a base of (mostly) software components sitting above the virtual bare metal – examples we have talked about include basic capabilities such as a database, web server and application server but also extend into larger value-added capabilities such as application frameworks (Spring, .Net, force.com), content management, integration, security and information lifecycle management.

Now, once the slice of the platform is provisioned, who can configure or program to the platform ? Continue reading →