As cloud computing dominates more and more aspects of the tech world, similar-sounding but confusingly different something-as-a-service acronyms keep piling up. You've probably heard of SaaS (Software as a Service), since it applies mostly to cloud services delivered to end users. 

But what about IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Even many tech professionals can't explain the differences without babbling incoherently. 

Fortunately, this new infographic from IaaS provider ProfitBricks does a good job of explaining the differences and who uses which one for what. Enjoy.

Microsoft may be a distant runner-up to iOS and Android in the smartphone race, and still lags Amazon EC2 in the cloud wars, but executives from the Windows Phone and Azure divisions aren't hurting for respect. In the past week, senior Microsoft executives have joined disruptive challengers in the mobile and cloud markets, suggesting that Microsoft's brainpower isn't lacking, even if its market share is.

The first executive departure was Charlie Kindel, the former Microsoft executive who managed developer outreach for Windows Phone, who actually left Microsoft nearly two years ago but just now found his way to Amazon. While it's still anyone's guess as to what Kindel will be doing at Amazon - given his past role with Windows Phone, some are mooting the possibility that he will be helping build out an Amazon phone - this is becoming a bit of a habit for Windows Phone executives to leave for Amazon.

After all, just last year Brandon Watson, also from the Windows Phone developer outreach team, left for Amazon. In his case, Watson joined Amazon to help on the Kindle cross-platform team.

Nor is it just the Windows Phone team that has been leaking.

Today Red Hat announced that it had snagged Radhesh Balakrishnan, Microsoft's Azure chief for Asia-Pacific, to run its virtualization efforts, including OpenShift, Red Hat's open-source PaaS offering. If Red Hat were to borrow from any competitor to steal a march on VMware in the virtualization market, or Amazon in the cloud market, Microsoft was a great place to look.

After all, Microsoft has been cutting into VMware's virtualization market share for years, and Azure has become a solid #2 to Amazon, as a recent Forrester survey indicates:

One way to look at this is that Microsoft is hemorrhaging talent and must be a sinking ship. But I think this would be an incorrect reading. After all, though Microsoft is late to both the cloud and mobile parties, it's making progress in both, and continues to own the affections of CIOs. 

No, I think the better interpretation is that for all Microsoft's execution issues, it continues to have a bevy of super-smart employees. Amazon and Red Hat certainly seem to think so. 

And for every Microsoft executive that leaves, there are many more who are choosing to stay. If anything, these departures say little about Microsoft's fortunes and instead simply indicate that Amazon and Red Hat may offer exciting options of their own. While it's tempting to assume that executive departures are a clear sign of a company's struggles, reading the tea leaves in this way would put Apple, Facebook and Google, among others, in serious jeopardy.

Most people would love to have that kind of "jeopardy."

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Lucas Carlson is the founder and CEO of AppFog.

2012 was a huge year for the cloud, providing developers with a bounty of both public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options.

Enterprise developers quickly understood the benefits of the cloud, and sunk their teeth into porting projects onto public infrastructure, experimenting with PaaS, developing cloud-based dev/test solutions and incorporating all kinds of SaaS offerings into their daily workflow.

While this is all very exciting for developers, rampant cloud adoption can be a headache for enterprise IT departments. They need to manage, govern and control cloud adoption or deal with chaos.

Uncontrolled Cloud Growth Creates Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is what happens when enterprise IT and the lines of business it supports all simultaneously but independently employ a variety of cloud services in an uncoordinated fashion.

The business groups could be running apps across a half-dozen different runtimes and using an equal number of different database technologies - some on-premise on a VMware vSphere cloud, others experimenting with OpenStack and some on Rackspace OpenCloud across various regions and zones. The rest could be using Amazon’s public cloud - in Virginia or perhaps Singapore.

In some cases, the enterprise pays for the cloud services. But in many cases, individuals are simply using their personal credit cards and expensing the costs. It’s the Wild Wild West!

Not surprisingly, IT leaders are conflicted. On one hand, they’re inspired by the drive and creativity of their development teams. And they love the velocity of development and releases, and the innovation that results. But they are positively horrified by the thought of making it all work together: “If my department has an app in development on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we need it on our private cloud. Who’s going to make that happen? How much time are we talking here?”

From Cloud Sprawl To Cloud Sanity?

Cloud sanity means having one deployment and management solution responsible for the wide range of app lifecycle processes, including app deployment, deletion, starting/stopping, database service provisioning and tunneling, cloning and re-deploying apps across infrastructures, memory management and more.

It also means having one solution for deploying to AWS, and for migrating from Azure to OpenStack, and for creating new PostgresQL databases, and for syncing up distributed systems through RabbitMQ… well, you get the idea. Right now, sadly, most companies have a single tool (or more commonly each employee has their own version of a script) for each individual task.

The old way of taming cloud sprawl was through vendor lock-in. If your company’s data and apps ended up scattered across a variety of clouds, then you were compelled to pull them all under a single umbrella, be it a private cloud or a single public cloud provider. IT gained predictability from doing this, but lost the ability to experiment outside of the chosen vendor’s bubble. Lock-in means degraded velocity and an elimination of flexibility. Lock-in means an end to innovation.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Horizontal Hybrid PaaS = Cloud Sanity

A horizontal hybrid PaaS provides a single solution to handle app deployment and management without having to give up on an agile, experimental way of doing things. With a horizontal hybrid PaaS, the enterprise gains freedom from both vendor lock-in and cloud sprawl.

CTOs, CIOs, IT directors and other technology decision makers regain governance of cloud services across the enterprise, as well as single-point-of-truth insight into where apps and services are housed. If they don’t like what they see in terms of performance or agility or any other metric, the workload portability gained from using a horizontal hybrid PaaS makes it easy to switch between clouds, turn services on and off, and switch apps from development to production and back.

Meanwhile, developers gain agility and speed above and beyond anything they’ve experienced in the enterprise. They gain the ability to use and experiment with a variety of cloud services – public, private, Rackspace, AWS, OpenStack, Azure and any language they want – in a way that doesn’t give their bosses headaches about cloud sprawl.

Business leaders are happy because IT is humming along, quickly implementing new ideas and doing more with less. All with reduced cost complexity.

Heterogeneous Clouds In The Enterprise

In 2013, heterogeneity is the name of the game in the cloud. But cloud heterogeneity is still scarier than it needs to be. But heterogeneity can be freeing and enabling, if it's properly managed.

IT should want to have it all: flexibility and control, experimentation and insight, the cost and efficiency advantages of the cloud and a no-surprises approach to cost apportionment.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Daniel Lopez is co-founder and CTO of BitNami.

It is difficult to avoid a weird feeling of Deja-vu when looking at the current cloud-computing landscape. Microsoft is once again battling for the future of the technology industry.

For years, Microsoft dominated the IT landscape with its Windows operating system, providing an industry-standard platform that others built on top of. Regardless of any pricing issues or technical shortcomings, the vast ecosystem of Windows applications and service providers ensured the continued success of the platform for many years and was an insurmountable barrier for competitors. It was not until the Web came along that this dominance was seriously challenged. The book High-Stakes, No Prisoners chronicles the story of the Frontpage acquisition and does a good job of providing a peek into the ruthless ‘battle for the Web’ against Netscape.

Microsoft Is A Cloud Computing Underdog

Microsoft is now waging another platform war: the battle for the cloud. The difference is that this time, Microsoft is the underdog.

Amazon has built not only an automated way to spin up new servers and databases, but an entire platform for building and running a whole new generation of applications. Where in the past you had to write apps using Win32 APIs and third-party OCX controls, you can now write applications using Amazon’s cloud APIs for file storage, database access, message queues and dozens of other services. The launch of the AWS marketplace further solidified Amazon’s move up the stack. If Amazon acquires a critical mass of users and vendors to build on top of its platform, the network effect will make it very difficult to displace that ecosystem.

Microsoft has not been sitting idle. The original version of Windows Azure was architected around a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering and was very Windows-specific. It had many shortcomings and attracted little developer and partner support.

Making Windows Azure More Competitive

However, in 2013 Microsoft has refreshed its Azure offering, providing a Virtual-Machine-centric offering modeled after Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The company went out of its way to make sure Linux and open source were first-class citizens. Microsoft has even demoed Azure using Apple MacBook Pro laptops and launching Ubuntu images. Microsoft finally “got it” - the launch of Azure Virtual Images was the first step towards fighting AWS head on.

About a month, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Azure Community portal, which provides dozens of popular open source applications and language runtimes contributed by partners. Even more recently, Microsoft took this a step further and made the images from the portal available directly in the Azure console, so they can be easily deployed onto Azure infrastructure. By making it easier to deploy third-party apps on its cloud, Microsoft is helping to grow its own ecosystem while increasing the utilization of its infrastructure. It also provides a counterpart to the AWS marketplace that, while limited, it is in many aspects simpler and easier to use.

Not Better, But Maybe Good Enough?

Microsoft still offers only a fraction of the functionality of Amazon, but it has a much bigger established user base among small and medium businesses and the enterprise. Coupled with its willingness to aggressively compete on price, Microsoft does not necessarily need to be better than Amazon to win. It just needs to be “good enough” to prevent its own users from switching.

It is incredibly refreshing to finally see viable competition to Amazon in the public cloud arena. Together with Google Compute Engine, Microsoft should be able to give Amazon a good run for its money.

Who will be the big winners of this war? For one, end users, who will benefit from lower prices from increased competition, as the cloud giants fight for market share.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

100 years from now, when the historians look back at the beginning of the 21st Century and shake their heads in amazement that we hadn't yet figured out flying cars, one thing they should give us credit for is that we finally figured out how to scale... everything. Even though the promise of the Web as a center of knowledge has been overrun with rampant commercialism, sometimes commercial interests actually align with the delivery of knowledge.

Software, databases, customer relationship management… these are all key elements of information technology that haver been pushed into the cloud to be deployed "as-a-Service" (or *aaS). This follows the model of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), and the like. Other, more rudimentary, aspects of IT have already been deployed this way, to great effect: Witness how online bookseller Amazon now dominates cloud computing by introducing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) a few years ago.

As the idea of a sharing and scaling services that were otherwise once local and isolated continues to spread, we are now seeing just about every function you can imagine being delivered as-a-service to any business who wants them.

Marketing-as-a-Service

The most recent example of this new *aaS trend is the release of the Vocus Marketing Suite, a hosted marketing service that enables small- to medium-sized businesses to access marketing tools and (more importantly) expertise for those SMBs to use.

Anyone, really, can toss together a bunch of tools to market with social media, email and press releases. A one-pane aggregate application could handle that. But using the publicly available big data that's readily available on the Internet, Vocus' new application is designed to push out very targeted information that pertains to a business' marketing goals.

Say a business wants to sell jewelry, outlined You Mon Tsang, Vocus' Senior Vice President of Products. The Marketing Suite will listen for keywords on social media channels to determine who's an influencer in the jewelry scene or maybe just which desperate significant other is out there looking to buy an anniversary gift fast.

If you're using email marketing, the tool will make sure you're not spamming potential clients, either in frequency or through the language you're using. Human editors will also step in to help craft messaging. The key to this new service making the expertise affordable to SMBs who might otherwise have to go it alone.

Big data, as mentioned, makes this all possible. In the past, marketing was sort of a gray area when it came to hard results. Using a new class of metrics, marketing's return on investment is now much more easily calculated, and results can be concretely measured.

Healthcare-as-a-Service

There are some who would argue that some things still don't scale very well. Medical information and healthcare services seem to be one of them.  Sure, you can go on to WebMD and find out how to treat the cold that seems to be coming on… but without medical expertise at your disposal, you may decide that you really have the bubonic plague. And while "the plague is upon us" has a nice historical ring, it also tends to be a bit alarmist.

Healthcare professionals don't scale terribly well online, if only because the medical arts depend, usually, on face-to-face contact between the patient and the caregiver.

This is not to say that some aspects of healthcare can't be found in *aaS. A new startup in Indiana called hc1.com, for instance, has created a very niche cloud approach to resource management for medical labs, so they can work with multiple providers and deliver analyses more efficiently.

As medical providers continue to work with government and market requirements to use electronic health records, vendors like ClearDATA are working the edges, delivering secure messaging and cloud computing services.

So healthcare and medical-sector services are finding their way into the cloud, though still more on the edges instead of a full-on approach. But after a few more years of medical-monitoring innovation, who's to say you won't someday get a text message that says "Stop eating that pastrami, your arteries are about to pop!"

Anything-as-a-Service?

The world around us, thanks to connectivity and much faster computing platforms, seems destined to push all manner of services on to the Internet, where they can be acquired on demand, without having to build your own infrastructure to support them. Distance learning, shopping, news gathering and many more are already there. Others are coming, and there's no telling how far the trend will go.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Not so long ago, the most advanced piece of technology present at the intersection of consumer and retailer was the cash register. Today, buyers are bringing their own technology on their shopping trips - and trailing a very revealing online data footprint. One big enterprise software company is promising retailers new technology that will let retailers leverage that information to market to those consumers in real-time.

For retailers and tech companies that serve them, billions of dollars are up for grabs. If there were any doubts that there was real money to be made leveraging big data to create custom marketing pitches in real time, those doubts should be shattered by Tuesday's entrance of mega-software corporation SAP into the retail tech frenzy. The move is the equivalent of an elephant walking into a room of working mice and telling everyone, "I've got this."

SAP's product is a new implementation of its upcoming NetWeaver Cloud called SAP Precision Retailing that uses the consumer's location, social profile, needs and the time at which they are conducting their business to generate relevant content (including discounts and special deals) designed to get that particular consumer to make the purchases the retailer desires. Technology, then, as virtual salesperson.

On the surface, this is nothing new. Social media profiles have been used as a marketing tool for quite a while now, as have location-based services that suggest a business or product to you when you're nearby. SAP's product, though, is a major effort to combine a lot of different inputs and process them in real-time. SAP's pragmatic approach to this new market runs right up to the point of being just a bit creepy.

Real-Time Analysis In Aisle 14

All of this real-time processing promises a very personalized level of interaction between the retailer and consumer, according to Herve Pluche, Vice President, Retail Consumer Mobile Initiative, SAP Lab, enabling the retailer to "influence behavior."

That retailers are in the business of influencing customers is not new either - visit most any U.S. grocery store and you'll have to schlep back to the rear of the store just to get your milk. The store is trying to make sure you see lots of other items to tempt you along the way. But SAP's determination to extol the processing benefits of its new system seems destined to raise eyebrows among privacy advocates.

The profile aspect of the new Precision Retailing product could be a red flag, since it mines past transaction history (online and in-store) and social media profiles to help figure out what it is you need and want. Customers using this service will likely have given permission to the retailer to perform such actions when they click "Accept" for the Terms of Service, so there's no technical breach of privacy, but such real-time analysis could tip consumers into the creeped-out zone when they see it in action?

Of course, SAP is not exactly trying to ease customer's minds here: it wants to sell this system to the businesses that can use the capabilities. And it may not be a hard sell. The product is already in use, and doing pretty well.

Pluche related that one European grocery retailer with 12,000 stores in seven countries is using the Precision Retailing system to deliver discount information into customers' hands via smart devices and in-store kiosks. The promotions were often the same ones that were email- and direct mail-blasted to customers, but Pluche explained that identical promotions see a conversion rate eight times higher when delivered directly as opposed to mass-distributed. That's a piece of data sure to attract the attention of retailers.

The Numbers Behind SAP's Product

Retailers are very motivated to get technology like this in place. A recent Retail Systems Research study noted the "top 3 technologies reported by survey respondents were customer purchase analytics, CRM, and marketing operations planning" - right where SAP's new product lives. And despite few problems collecting customer data, only 56% of the retailer respondents now believe they know who their best shoppers are, a big drop from last year's 73% figure.

There's also a little Inside Baseball action happening here. Precision Retailing's core technology, NetWeaver Cloud, is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing product that has not yet been generally released. NetWeaver Cloud relies on SAP's HANA in-memory database, which competes directly with Oracle's Exadata X3 database announced at OracleWorld this weekend. SAP's launch of Precision Retailing is no doubt going to be used as an early showcase of what NetWeaver Cloud can do.

So ready or not, consumers are going to see a lot more use of their shopping and social data driving future transactions, because retailers are increasingly shifting in that direction. SAP may be one of the largest players in this rapidly evolving space, but it won't be the last.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

When Steve Ballmer took the stage in San Francisco on Monday to reveal the next step in the evolution of Microsoft’s most important application, he gave the world’s 1 billion users of Microsoft Office plenty to look forward to - but also some things to worry about. Here’s a sampling of what to look for, what to avoid and what to be afraid of.

You can check out the free customer preview edition of the cloud-based Office 365 at Office.com.preview now.

1. ARM Power

What To Like: Works on ARM-based and Intel-powered Windows 8 devices, as well as Windows 7 machines. And Ballmer promised the ARM release is complete, “not a junior version.”

What Not To Like: Won’t work on Windows Vista or Windows XP.

What To Worry About: Office for the Mac will get an update with Office 365 and SkyDrive, but there's no word on when and if Mac users will enjoy all the new features in Windows 365.

2. Touch the Magic

What To Like: Touch controls and finger navigation are far more integrated than ever before. And Office 365 supports pen commands as well.

What Not To Like: Not everything is touch-enabled. A pen? Really?

What To Worry About: All this touch stuff doesn’t do much for traditional computer users.

3. At Home and At Work

What To Like: Ballmer promised Office 365 offers “productivity for people at work and at home, in small business and large business.”

What Not To Like: That’s a lot of masters to serve. And on Monday at least, Microsoft's emphasis was clearly on homemakers and students, with enterprises playing second fiddle.

What To Worry About: To some extent, the needs of various groups simply don’t align all that well - it remains to be seen if everyone will get what they really want.

4. All About Windows 8

What To Like: Office 365 is designed to “embrace the design concepts and principles in Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Metro.”

What Not To Like: If you don’t like Windows 8, you’re not going to like Office 365, either.

What To Worry About: Windows 8’s Metro interface looks great on tablets and smartphones, but may not hold up on giant desktop displays. How will Office 365’s interface look and work on such a variety of platforms?

5. Service First

What To Like: Ballmer said that Office 365 was designed “from the get-go” to be a service first. When you’re streaming it, you can start using it even before the download is complete.

What Not To Like: Not much, except that all features may not function until the stream is complete. And this thing is likely to consume lots of bandwidth.

What To Worry About: Ballmer promised that “you can still buy the software and download it… Office will continue to be a product. That’s not going away - certainly not at this stage of the game.” What did he mean with that last part about "not at this stage..."? 

6. The Cloud Remembers

What To Like: Office 365 is designed to use the cloud to remember what you were doing, what your preferences and favorites are, who you’re working with, and what docs you’re working on whenever you log in.

What Not To Like: The offline capabilities may not be as robust, and depending on whether you’re using a computer or a smartphone, you may not be able to continue the work you were doing.

What To Worry About: While Office 365 may not be as intrusive as Google Now, Microsoft is going to learn an awful lot about you and what you’re working on.

7. Hiding the Ribbon

What To Like: The clean new interface hides the much-maligned ribbon interface by default, but the ribbon is still available when needed. You can even “pin” it if you want to keep it always available.

What Not To Like: Change is always hard. Just when you got used to the ribbon, it’s no longer front and center.

What To Worry About: Even if the new interface is an overall improvement, will you still be able find the commands and functions you want to use?

8. Markup Heaven

What To Like: Vastly improved markup and annotation features make it easier for multiple users to draw directly on documents - either in real-time meetings or during the document editing process.

What Not To Like: Not all the markup processes are the same on all Office apps.

What To Worry About: On the one hand - heavily marked-up, annotated and commented documents can quickly turn into unreadable messes. On the other hand - will anyone actually use pen-based markup tools?

9. There’s a Movie in Your Document

What To Like: In-line multimedia in various Office 365 apps puts videos and images right inside the app.

What Not To Like: Waiting for that stuff to download from the cloud when you actually want to see it.

What To Worry About: Straight text ain’t good enough no more.

10. Everything’s a Platform

What To Like: Office is now a platform, with its own API and app store for programs; the store even supports ratings and prices. And Microsoft promises that enterprises will be able to control access to apps and even maintain their own “stores” of approved and internal choices.

What Not To Like: Office 365 hasn’t been released yet, but nonetheless there aren't many apps in the store yet.

What To Worry About: Initial examples include live Bing Maps and Suggested Appointments. How difficult will it be for third-party developers to create apps, and what will be their incentives? And who gets blamed when the IT department shuts out the apps that users actually want?

11. Save the Cloud

What To Like: Saving documents to the cloud - Microsoft SkyDrive - is now the default, making backup and sharing/collaborating/posting much easier.

What Not To Like: Some people are bound to want those documents when they don’t have Net access.

What To Worry About: Will users remember where they put their documents?

12. Skype Gets Integrated

What To Like: Skype integration adds new ways to communicate with contacts, and includes presence info so users know who is available.

What Not To Like: Not everyone uses Skype.

What To Worry About: Do you really want the loser in the next cubicle loudly video-chatting all day long?

13. Search Speeds Up

What To Like: Faster search capability now includes documents, people, discussions, videos, reports, etc.

What Not To Like: Nothing - search is a good thing.

What To Worry About: Will all those results make it harder to find what you’re actually looking for?

14. Read Mode

What To Like: Word’s new Read Mode employs auto-resizing to make it easier to consume content on devices of various sizes. You can even change the background to suit lighting conditions. It can also embed multimedia for inline play.

What Not To Like: Is this a solution in search of a problem?

What To Worry About: Read Mode also lets you add and view comments with presence enabled, so you can quickly connect with the commenter if they’re available. Suddenly, this doesn’t seem like “reading” any more.

15. Presenters Get a New View

What To Like: In PowerPoint, the new Presenter View combines current and upcoming slides, presentation time and notes to make it easier to see where you are in your presentation.

What Not To Like: PowerPoint is still stuck in the slideshow metaphor. As Scott Fulton points out, we’re rapidly moving to a video world.

What To Worry About: The easier and more powerful that PowerPoint gets, the worse the presentations are that people build with it. Also, how do you get to that Presenter View again?

16. Outlook Catches Up

What To Like: New Outlook features like inline replies, mark-for-followup, previews, connections to social networks, and “People Cards” listing contacts' notes, organizations, memberships, social feeds such as Facebook, Linked In, Yammer and so on.

What Not To Like: A lot of these features still feel like imitations of Google’s Gmail.

What To Worry About: What’s the appropriate role of an email program in 2013?

17. Outlook Goes Social

What To Like: Outlook has new hooks to bring in data from Facebook and LinkedIn, and the program now supports multiple email accounts.

What Not To Like: Outlook also includes a Weather Bar. Yawn.

What To Worry About: In corporate settings, all that social media info could be seen as distracting - or even create compliance issues.

18. Peek at What’s Next

What To Like: Outlook’s new Peeks feature lets you hover over various areas of the screen - the calendar at bottom, for example - to get a quick intereactive look at what’s there.

What Not To Like: How do you “hover” in a touch interface?

What To Worry About: You have to remember to hover to see what’s there.

19. Excel Bulks Up with New Features

What To Like: Excel’s clever Flash Fill feature should save time entering data. Power View pulls together maps, charts, graphs and other data types into a single place, and dynamically updates them all as you change the data. Quick Analysis gives you an instant menu to functions based on the range of cells you've highlighted - without using the Ribbon!

What Not To Like: You'd better check what Flash Fill enters before sending a spreadsheet to your boss. 

What To Worry About: How much of Excel’s power did most users actually take advantage of? Will Office 365 raise or lower that percentage?

20. Radial Goodness

What To Like: OneNote’s new Radial Menu offers a slick and circular way to choose fonts and colors, as well as ways to insert and edit elements such as tables.

What Not To Like: Available only for the OneNote note-taking app - not the core Microsoft Office applications.

What To Worry About: Great for touch users, not necessarily as useful for mouse drivers.

All images by Fredric Paul for ReadWriteWeb.

In an interview with ReadWriteWeb, the man who led the Heroku PaaS platform to prominence - and who continues to lead it as Executive Vice President of Salesforce - says that as his platform expands, it could certainly penetrate old barriers. One such barrier could be the ribbon, if you will, in front of a "Heroku apps store." Another is the perimeter of the cloud that has supported it to date, Amazon EC2.

"Amazon works great as a platform for Heroku and for its customers. Every day we are expanding how much we run on Amazon, because our services are expanding so quickly," says Salesforce's Byron Sebastian. He's referring to Heroku's expansion earlier this month of its Postgres database services, with two new, smaller tiers at $50 (Crane) and $100 (Kappa) per month, as well as an entirely new process model called Cedar - rolled out Wednesday - that adds the ability to run "one-off" processes against any application being run on the platform.  That's a huge expansion in capacity requirements in just one month's time, and if any cloud infrastructure service in the world is capable of meeting those requirements, it's Amazon.

A Bridge to Heroku's Parent's Cloud

But the pending need for such requirements led to open speculation about whether Heroku may add the option at some point for certain customers, perhaps in particular locales, to use parent company Salesforce's infrastructure instead - maybe for a discount. In our discussion with Sebastian, he made certain we understood he's only strengthening his commitments with Amazon. But he didn't bat down the possibility of a home-grown alternative.

"We do hear from customers, especially as Heroku sees increased traction over the last 12 to 18 months, that large enterprises often have very specific requirements about what they want to see in the overall infrastructure," he says. "They want to have flexibility and choice in terms of the characteristics of where they're running their applications. So directionally, we see Heroku being able to offer customers like that the choice of different cloud infrastructures based on different operational requirements they might have. In some cases, it might be locale; in some, it might be low-latency connectivity, [such as] with the Singapore Stock Exchange; in some cases, it's how much visibility they have into the audit trails within data centers; in some cases, it might be related to data residency, and wanting to keep data within a certain country."

There are a number of market forces at work here. One is the equal and opposite reaction, you could say, from the so-called "consumerization of IT:" Think of it as the industrialization of service. Earlier this week, we saw a potentially game-changing breakthrough from Box.net, as it opened up service tiers to price and terms negotiation for enterprises for the first time. It's an indication that metered service doesn't work for everyone, especially large enterprises. Another, which Sebastian also referred to above, is the need for certain countries (especially in Europe) to keep their data within their own home territories, to avoid inspection by foreign countries' law enforcement bodies.

"Directionally, we see giving these high-end customers more and more choice about the infrastructure that they're running. And our long-term strategy ultimately includes continuing to expand [Heroku] to do more and more with Amazon," Sebastian says. "Since we were acquired, we did anticipate at some point running in Salesforce [data centers]...  Heroku is very much about choice, about openness and about giving customers control and the ability to make decisions about how they want their applications and infrastructure to be run."

An Expanded Process Model

The XVP's comments come amid this week's rollout by Heroku of what is hoped to be a greatly enhanced process model - the system with which the platform runs applications. Called Cedar, the new system continues to support Ruby (including work with the Rails framework), Java (including work with the Spring or Play frameworks), Python (including work with the Django framework), Clojure, Node.js, Scala and Facebook Platform. What Cedar adds is the capability to scale applications much more granularly, including manual scaling of the number of dynos (Heroku's virtual units of work) and spinning off "one-off" processes from the command line.

Sebastian tells RWW that Cedar will continue to follow Heroku's architecture of enabling different components of an application to be developed using any of the languages it supports.  "Cedar gives the developer tight control over the processes - how many processes are running, what types and so on. That, we strongly believe, is the key building block to building platform-as-a-service," he says.

He reaffirmed a long-held belief that developers don't particularly want to manage servers, especially since today, virtualization has rendered them artificial constructs anyway. "If you're a developer, what matters to you if you're thinking about computational power is the processes that are running in your processor. By creating a process model that gives developers a lot of power over how those processes are used, how they're delegated, how they're assigned, and so on, we're able to give a huge amount of control back to the developer, and at the same time remove a lot of the overhead, because they don't have to deal with these concepts of servers - which are an artificial concept that gets in the way of the developer."

Polyglot with a Caveat

Recently, Heroku has been facing new challenges from cloud platforms including Apprenda (a .NET platform competing with Windows Azure), some of which are making the case that having too much language choice - what Sebastian calls a "polyglot cloud" - ends up confusing developers rather than assisting them. When we brought up that topic with Sebastian, he surprised us by saying that while Heroku has this broad portfolio, it has more focus than some may realize.

"Our Cedar stack enables multiple languages to be run on Heroku. But in doing that, we decided very carefully that the goal was not going to be to support every language under the sun as a value proposition. We decided it was very important that, just as people had really come to see us as the best platform for running Ruby apps in the cloud, for the other languages we introduced, we achieve a similar level of developer productivity and operational agility. There are certain specific languages that we really focus on, to be the best platform for developers to run their apps on... Focus is really important. The underlying value of the cloud platform can be applied to a number of different languages. We realized we could scale out to support additional languages, but do it properly, in a way that's friendly to developers, providing the tools and frameworks they expect."

An Heroku Storefront?

There are a growing number of Heroku apps available on the iTunes App Store (especially for, of all things, managing one's own Heroku apps), as well as new customer-facing apps on the Shopify store. Does this give Heroku any ideas about pulling off its own version of, say, Salesforce's AppExchange? While declining to give specifics, Byron Sebastian gave us substantial reason to believe there could be much more to say on that subject during Salesforce's annual DreamForce conference this September.

"It's very clear that, with the move toward social enterprises at Salesforce, part of becoming a social enterprise is giving [customers] the experience of being able to very quickly try, experiment, and review applications and new technologies, [and] make it very easy to purchase those applications in that marketplace... Everybody's getting into that business, and we definitely see that part of being a social enterprise is providing marketplaces with very easy on-ramps, in order to try out applications. In the case of Heroku, we already do that with our add-ons for infrastructure for developers, but that's a key direction for the future, and it's part of being 'cloud.' "

If you're an applications developer, then your business is to deliver service. In that case, you have a life-altering choice to make: Do you deliver all your functionality to your client and count on it to be executed there in its entirety, or do you let some or all of it be executed on a server in what your customers are calling the "cloud"?

What the Cloud Is, For Real

The reasons why the tablet form factor has taken the world by storm now, when it failed to do so in 2007, 2002, 1997 and 1992, are both obvious and harder to explain. The obvious reason is Apple's runaway success in design, distribution and marketing. But a less obvious but no less important reason is that the cost of bandwidth has dropped and the availability of it has risen, making it possible to deliver a greater level of functionality than can be provided by the device's processor alone. 

That has fundamentally changed computing's value proposition. Just a few days ago, I visited a Staples outlet where, inside the big bargain can in the center of the store, I found a multi-disk 2000s-era U.S./Canada street mapping program that once sold in the triple digits. It was selling for five bucks. To make it even more poignant, I had seen the exact same box, with the very same Post-It note listing the same discount price, in the same bargain can three years ago. Imagine how many hundreds of customers rejected this poor box as a relic from another era (like a rainbow leg-warmer or a moderate Republican).

The way we use functionality has changed so fundamentally, so swiftly and cleanly, that it takes a $5 box of outmoded DVDs that are three years old to drive the point home: The Internet is becoming a network of terminals, just as engineers dreamed in the mid-1960s. Web technology is making those terminals portable and transferrable between devices. So your entitlement to functionality or apps may no longer depend upon your browser, runtime or operating system. The statements consumers make today about the diminishing differences between a Mac and a PC will soon be made about the differences between Android, iOS and Windows Phones. The apps will become portable and adaptable between them. When that happens, much of the subject matter that constitutes today's "tech news" will cease to be relevant.

What will remain relevant is how you get your functionality. People still tend to think of applications, or apps, in the context of their client-side profile. For example, you've probably seen the debates over so-called "native apps" versus "Web apps," which are centered around the differences between designing a program specifically for one class of device (e.g., iOS apps purchased through iTunes or Android apps acquired via Google Play) versus designing it using HTML5 to be more device-agnostic. While the latter is often associated with a more open-minded, politically correct stance, as more applications are delivered as cloud-based services, the distinctions become less relevant. If a Windows 8 user in 2013 installs an app on her Start screen and the same app on her Android phone, as long as that app does its job, the identity or ownership of the language it's written in may not matter a hill of beans to the consumer.

However, if that app fails to do its job on all devices, the consumer may blame the cloud platform that delivers it instead of her phone. This is why we need to take stock of the emerging landscape of server-driven computing, which is transcending and sublimating the Web.

Can't tell the players without a scorecard

Again, what qualifies an app as a "cloud app" is the fact that it performs its job on the server and delivers results to the client - as opposed to producing a program for the key functionality that the client then executes. Apple's Siri is a prime example of a cloud app - your iPhone doesn't process your verbal commands, Apple's servers do. Apple doesn't sell Siri as a "SaaS application" or a "cloud service platform," because it doesn't need to. It's a feature of iPhones, and that's good enough.

A "cloud platform" is a broader concept. Just as the inventors of the BASIC programming language conceived a half-century ago, cloud platforms (sometimes called "PaaS, or Platform as a Service," because developers simply cannot become cool to save their lives) process language code on behalf of clients and deliver results to them through the network. Because this business is so new and evolving so quickly, it's impossible to use conventional metrics to say who's the leader in this field just yet. But there are many prominent players, some of whom you've heard of, some of whom you haven't. 

The reason cloud platforms are growing in importance is because they are highly fertile ecosystems for creating, distributing and selling functionality - apps that customers install and that have explicit functions. Each platform has the potential for skyrocketing performance - for joining iTunes in the stratosphere.

Among the central players of all sizes making sizable waves in this new and critical market are these (in order of alphabet, not importance):

• CloudBees is a deployment platform specifically for Java apps, whose principal value proposition comes from the inclusion of management services. For example, CloudBees has tools for large development groups to manage the creation process; then post-deployment, the company offers Jenkins-branded maintenance services, such as helpdesks for customers.
• Cloud Foundry is an innovative, multi-language platform that is officially open source, but whose caretaker is virtualization leader VMware. Development takes place in Java (with Spring and Grails frameworks), Ruby (with the Rails framework), Node.js, or Scala (a highly scalable, statically typed derivative of Java), all on a VMware "micro" virtual machine hosted locally. Deployment becomes an automated matter of moving the apps from the local VM to a cloud-based VM. One of Cloud Foundry's key value points is that the form of the application is not tied to the platform, so developers have the freedom of moving it to other platforms, including those they may host themselves.
• DotCloud is an independent, multi-language platform that boasts simple, command-line-based deployment of apps and databases using Amazon's AWS cloud. Its value proposition includes flat monthly fees instead of consumption-based metering.
• Elastic Beanstalk is operated by Amazon Web Services, the undisputed cloud infrastructure leader. It's essentially an automated deployment system for .NET, Java and PHP apps to be deployed on Amazon's EC2 cloud servers.
• Engine Yard offers managed deployments of apps using Ruby on Rails and PHP (through its subdivision brand Orchestra) on Amazon's AWS infrastructure. Its value-add includes self-service configuration and capacity management tools.
• Force.com is the proprietary cloud platform from Salesforce.com. It uses its own language and constructs and is geared primarily for the exchange of data and services between customer-centric applications. Salesforce is now deploying Force.com on separate platforms, including one exclusively built for public-sector customers, including governments.
• Google App Engine is a simplified, but also inexpensive, deployment platform for applications in Java, Python or the open-source language Go. The benefit here is that Google offers some open APIs that present handles to Google services, one of the most important being user authentication through Google Accounts.
• Heroku is Salesforce's platform for non-proprietary technologies. Its value proposition (aside from what many perceive to be its relatively high performance) is its deployment of a wide variety of languages - typically those preferred by the open-source community, such as Clojure and Node.js, but also including experimental concepts like Scala.
• Longjump is one of the first cloud platforms in the field (as early as 2008!) and includes a model/view/controller (MVC) implementation of Java designed to let developers build componentized apps around their existing data. Since its inception, Longjump has been building out pre-configured, adaptable business services more along the lines of Force.com, such as enterprise collaboration.
• OpenShift is now operated by Red Hat and supports the Web's principal server-side languages: PHP, Perl, Ruby (with the Rails framework), Node.js (server-side JavaScript) and Python. Borrowing one approach from Cloud Foundry, its open-source release enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to host their own OpenShift platforms on their servers, as an alternative to being hosted on Red Hat's servers.
• SmartCloud is a relatively recent entry from IBM, enabling Java, Ruby, PHP and .NET-based languages along with hosted applications such as SAP and Siebel. In recent months, IBM has been adding business services to its value proposition.
• Windows Azure (or as folks refer to it nowadays, "Azure") was orignally created by Microsoft in 2008 as the ".NET Framework in the cloud." Since then, Microsoft has seen the light and has broadened Azure's repertoire, to include Java and other non-Microsoft technologies like Node.js.

The wealth of options and the wide (and growing) variety of players suggest a market-driven evolutionary path for cloud platforms. With the Web, standards organizations sought to settle upon a single method for accomplishing fundamental tasks, and when private interests sought their own workarounds, it was usually with the aim of cornering the market. But in the competitive and healthy cloud platform market, players innovate by offering options. Those options lead to architectural alternatives and new pathways that could never have been enabled by standards alone.

Stock images by Shutterstock

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Bass sees the world changing from a PC-centric model where workers promise to "email you that file when I get back to the office," to an environment where mobile devices and the cloud make where ever you are the computing center of the world.

It's already happening, he claimed, citing a list of impressive usage figures:

• 2 million unique visitors a month to Autodesk 360, the company's cloud offering


• 30 files a minute uploaded to AutoCAD WS, the company's cloud-based AutoCAD editor


• 10 million downloads of SketchBook in 2 years, now averaging 150,000 per week on PC and mobile platforms


• 13 million unique visitors - more than Pinterest - to the company's Instructables community


• 21 million unique visitors a month to Pixlr, its online photo editor

On the low end, naysayers like to denigrate the importance of mobile products, Bass said, calling them "juvenile" "toys." But he pointed out that "consumers by night are often professionals by day."

He also claimed that professionals can do serious work on today's portable devices. "I think we're underestimating these small devices... in the work that we do. They can run serious apps" for engineers and other demanding users, and they are getting more powerful all the time.

Meanwhile, on the high end, the cloud lets anyone take advantage of analyses that used to require dedicating expensive workstations for days at a time. Now, "You can do it in the cloud in an hour," he said.

The cloud, Bass added, "is an infinitely scalable resource," limited only by how much you're willing to pay. For urgent jobs, you can pay more and get it done faster. Other tasks can be done more cheaply over time. And that raises a fundamental question: "What would you do differently if you could compute answers faster?"

Autodesk may be a bit ahead of its time. The vast majority of serious design work is still being done sitting at powerful workstations, just as it has been for a while. But Bass couldn't be more correct about the trends. It's hard to argue that more and more computing tasks are going to stop moving away from the desktop. Big, data intensive jobs will move to the cloud while smaller, more UI-focused tasks are going mobile.

There will always be some things best done sitting at your computer. But the number of those things is clearly shrinking, not growing.

Tomorrow, I'll write about Autodesk's cloud-based PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) offering. But in the meantime, enjoy a couple more shots of some of the cool designs on display in the Autodesk Gallery:

Basically, the feature lets users of Heroku Postgres share a result of a SQL query via a URL. The results can be viewed in the browser, or downloaded in several standard formats.

What's the point of the feature? Rather than sharing a static snapshot of a query, this allows users to see a live result of a query at any given time. (Data Clips can also be locked to a specific time, if preferred.) So, for example, this might be useful to share up-to-date statistics on current inventory or sales results.

The example given on the Heroku blog combs through Wikipedia entries and finds people in the English articles with the term scientist or artist.

Note that this is not a feature that's available via upstream PostgreSQL. Soldo says that the feature is built on top of Heroku's Web based administration tool. "Because PostgreSQL doesn't have a built-in webserver, this feature wouldn't be possible on the standalone database."

The feature is immediately available to users of Heroku Postgres. Note that clips do have a few limits. Results are limited to 10,000 rows and the clips will not refresh more than once every 60 seconds.

This looks like a pretty nifty feature. Is this compelling enough to consider using Heroku Postgres instead of a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, though? Would be curious to hear what other folks think about it.

Before you run off thinking I'm advocating the destruction of PaaS platforms, please realize that I am not. Rather, I'm referring to the shift away from monolithic, one-size-fits-all PaaS systems towards more open, loosely coupled platforms that makes it easy to consume code and services provided by third parties.

Early PaaS offerings, circa 2007-2009, were conceived of as all-in-one affairs. In fact, a big part of the value proposition that providers envisioned was its delivery via proprietary services and custom APIs that developers would use in their applications. Examples include App Engine's data store and Memcache services, the Force.com data store, the distributed cache and storage systems we built at Appistry and many more.

The fact is, the early players in the space had little choice but to roll their own. At the time, there were critical gaps in the market that needed to be filled in order for developers on PaaS platforms to be able to deliver rich, scalable applications. Fortunately for PaaS users, this is no longer the case for most application-level services.

REST Assured, We've Got Git

In order to build modern, scalable, connected web applications, developers must have access to a wide variety of third-party components and services upon which to build. With the proliferation of open source and SaaS services, these are now readily available on the open market. While both open source and SaaS predated the earliest PaaS offerings, in recent years the advent of GitHub and the popularity of REST-based Web services has played a significant role in expanding the selection of building blocks available to developers.

GitHub, by dramatically lowering the barriers to collaborating on and sharing open source projects, has become an "App Store" of sorts for developers, and is home to over one million projects. Likewise, the popularization of Roy Fielding's REST model for web service APIs has simplified developer access to the many application- and app-infrastructure-oriented SaaS services now available. It's now possible to store files, query and analyze data, send emails, create maps, subscribe to messages, encode videos, and much more, just by sending simple HTTP-based commands. (If you've never visited the ProgrammableWeb API Directory, the selection will blow your mind.)

This Cambrian explosion of high quality components and services has made web application development a much more productive affair for developers. And because the market has removed the burden of providing these low-level building blocks, those PaaS providers ready to embrace openness stand to gain great advantage.

Modular PaaS is Better for Providers, Too

While the end-user benefits of an open approach to PaaS, namely increased choice and reduced lock-in are apparent, the advantages of a modular approach to PaaS are two-sided, benefiting providers at least as much as users. This is because, as a PaaS provider, it's simply too hard to deliver both a solid application platform and the services that plug into it. For most businesses, such a thing would spread their development resources too thinly, even if they had the necessary domain expertise, which most don't. In addition, because the open source and SaaS genies have left their bottles, trying to do it all puts the provider at odds with their customers.

By building and offering an open platform able to easily consume third-party components and services, and by cultivating a thriving ecosystem of the tools' providers, second-generation PaaS vendors can improve their own chances of success while creating a better world for their users.

Past performance notwithstanding, many industry watchers have predicted 2012 to be the breakout year for PaaS in the enterprise. Gartner, for example, reportedly communicated at its November Application Architecture Development & Integration conference its belief that 2012 marks the beginning of a rise in PaaS adoption from almost zero (3% of enterprises) to nearly half of all enterprises (43%) in 2015.

While it remains to be seen whether 2012 goes down in the history books as the year PaaS makes good, much of the groundwork for PaaS' predicted success was laid in 2011. Here are some trends from the past year:

Heroku Beyond Ruby

Salesforce.com's acquisition of Heroku for $250M, an estimated 50-100x revenue, while announced in December 2010, set the stage for a year of brisk investment in PaaS. In January, on the heels of the acquisition, we saw a flurry of Heroku investments and product launches including PHPFog (PHP), Gondor.io (Python/Django), Nodejitsu (Node.js) and CloudBees (Java). With this activity, the reach of PaaS was significantly broadened.

The Rise of Polyglot Platforms

The early flood of single-language PaaS platforms gave way to a move towards multi-language platforms later in the year, perhaps precipitated by DotCloud's entrance in the market with a vision of "One Platform, Any Stack." Established providers like Red Hat OpenShift and Heroku broadly expanded platform support, while the aforementioned PHPFog relaunched as AppFog with a new multi-language platform.

The rise of so-called polyglot PaaS platforms, while derided by some as stifling innovation, is significant in that it marks a departure from early "one size fits few" approaches to PaaS, towards something more flexible, familiar, accommodating, and with a bit less lock-in... Just what the enterprise user is looking for.

Enter Cloud Foundry

VMware's Cloud Foundry, which launched in April of 2011 and covered extensively in ReadWriteCloud, was not the first multi-language PaaS. Nor was it the first open-source PaaS, or the first PaaS backed by a major player in enterprise IT. It wasn't the first PaaS to be readily deployable in both public and private cloud environments. Nor was it the first PaaS to embrace the power of an extended ecosystem of developers and partners.

What made Cloud Foundry a game-changer in 2011 is the fact that it was the first PaaS to offer all of those things--on your laptop, in your data center, or in the cloud.

PaaS Ecosystems Flourish

Last but not least, the developer services ecosystems that have formed around the major offerings were expanded greatly in 2011. Users of these platforms can now easily add a wide variety of services such as caching, messaging and databases (SQL and NoSQL) to their applications. These ecosystems are powerful in that they simultaneously have made PaaS platforms more productive for developers and more profitable for providers, while they have reduced the threat of lock-in for users.

The role of these ecosystems is key, and I'm planning to explore this topic further in a future article.

In the meantime, I'll continue rooting for the success of PaaS customers and providers, with full knowledge that they are building upon solid foundations laid throughout the last year.

Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs.

Identity Federation to the AWS Management Console – Amazon is announcing single sign-on to AWS using corporate credentials. "We have extended IAM's Identity Federation functionality to also enable federated users to access the AWS Management Console. This allows you to enable your employees to sign in once to your corporate directory, and then use the AWS Management Console without having to sign in to AWS, providing single sign-on access to AWS." This is a pretty important piece for any public cloud provider.

Announcing node.js support – .Net PaaS provider AppHarbor has announced beta support for Node.js. "As you probably know by now we're committed to giving the .NET world the fastest and most convenient way to deploy, manage and scale applications on Windows-based servers in the cloud. As such we didn't immediately think of node.js as the most obvious second platform to support. With recent developments in the node.js community, in particular Microsoft's support of a native Windows implementation along with the performance and stability it brings, node.js on Windows has become viable."

Fundamental Oracle flaw revealed – If you're using Oracle's database software, you might want to pay attention to this InfoWorld piece by Paul Venezia. "This particular collection of Oracle issues could incur database outages that take considerable time and effort to correct." Venezia writes that there are instances when Oracle's database can become unstable or unavailable by manipulating the System Change Number (SCN) in Oracle. Patches are available from Oracle in its Critical Patch Update for January 2012.

Have a cloud news tip? Drop me a note at jzb@readwriteweb.com or to @jzb on Twitter.

Why can't you live migrate from newer to older versions of qemu/KVM? – Richard WM Jones explains why you can't perform a live migration from RHEL 6.2 to 6.1. "Live migration is completely different from shutting down and copying a guest. During live migration we must send the complete state of system RAM, virtual CPUs, and all virtual devices, over to the remote side."

Don't Step in the FUD: The Real World Demands Private Cloud – Copeland addresses some comments attributed to Heroku's CTO Adam Wiggins, who seems to be less than convinced that private cloud is viable for cloud computing. Expect this debate to continue for quite some time.

Is It Time To Get Rid Of The Linux OS Model In The Cloud? – Does it make sense that we still run applications on top of an application that runs on top of an OS that runs on top of virtualized hardware? Not according to Todd Hoff. "We are stuck in the past. We can hear the creakiness of the edifice we've built layer by creaky layer all around us. How will we build applications in the future and what kind of stack will help us get their faster?"

Resource usage accounting system for OpenStack – Dmitry Maslennikov announced the resource usage accounting system for OpenStack, nova-billing, is ready for review. Right now you can track disk usage, memory, virtual CPU, and storage space in Glance for images.

Have a cloud news tip? Drop me a note at jzb@readwriteweb.com or to @jzb on Twitter.

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Actually, he was moving from Blogger to WordPress, which makes it even more interesting. Shah gives a detailed explanation of how he moved his blog to OpenShift, including the commands to grab PHP, MySQL, add domains and set up the directory for WordPress.

Why would you want to do this? Scalability is one thing. I’m running a WordPress instance on Linode right now, and I can add resources if I want but it requires manual intervention and stopping/restarting the VPS to make changes. Hosting on a PaaS should mean you can scale up/down dynamically with no downtime.

It also means that the PaaS provider will take care of all the security updates. That’s true, or should be, if you’re using shared hosting or WordPress.com. However, the trade-off for shared hosting means that you’re on a server with who knows how many other users. It also offers much less flexibility. WordPress.com offers plenty of scalability, but again has much less flexibility in terms of what you can do (like install custom plugins, etc.).

One of the trends I’m hoping to see in 2012 is for projects like WordPress to be easily deployed on PaaS services.

The process Dubois outlines includes:

• Patching Bugzilla due to a conflict with a Perl module in Stackato's version of Perl.
• Implementing a fix to use Bugzilla with PSGI.
• Figuring out all the modules that Bugzilla needs.
• Writing a script to download, deploy and patch Bugzilla, because it's not available via CPAN.
• Fixing a bug in the CGI::Emulate::PSGI module.

Short and simple, right? At least Dubois put everything up on GitHub that you'd need to run Bugzilla on Stackato if you like.

Packaging for PaaS

One of the reasons I find Dubois' post interesting is how much more complicated it is right now to deploy a fairly standard FOSS application on a PaaS. If you want to run an entire image (operating system and all) it's easy to deploy a lot of stock applications on IaaS providers like AWS right now. But if you want to just deploy on top of a PaaS, there's a lot of lifting to do.

I think in 2012 we'll see smart PaaS providers working with popular FOSS projects to make sure that their software just runs.

Called Au-to-do, it's written in Python and uses Google Cloud Storage, the Prediction API, Tasks API and OAuth 2.

The getting started guide will walk you through all of the requirements and show you how to set up your own instance of Au-to-do. (It can be pronounced as "auto-do" or "ought to do.")

To get started you'll need the Google API Client Library for Python, a GAE application ID, and you'll also need to enable billing. GAE has a free quota for Cloud Storage, but you still need to hand over your billing info.

If you're just getting started with GAE, you might want to start with Google's Guestbook application instead, as it's a bit easier to set up.

The interesting thing about this application is that it makes use of the Predictions API to try to label incidents as they come into the system. I could see how extending Au-to-do to also make predictions about assigning tickets and priorities might be useful. The application is available under the Apache 2.0 license, so developers are welcome to grab and extend it.

Folks using Heroku as their PaaS have been able to make PostgreSQL their database of choice for some time. What's new here is that Heroku is letting people sign up for PostgreSQL services without using the rest of the Heroku platform. So if you're hosting some kind of app on AWS or your own server, you can tap Heroku for the database alone.

Heroku PostgreSQL is off-the-shelf PostgreSQL, "unforked and unmodified" according to Heroku. So if you decide that you need to bring your database back in-house for some reason (or to another provider), no worries. It's also assured to work with any client that uses libpq, so it should require no tweaking for programs that are already using PostgreSQL.

Why choose Heroku PostgreSQL rather than self-hosted PostgreSQL? Pretty much the same reason that you'd want any PaaS: scalability and handing off the hassles of maintenance to another provider. According to James Lindenbaum, who announced the service on Heroku's blog, "Heroku Postgres creates multiple, geographically distributed copies of all data changes as they are written. These copies are constantly checked for consistency and corruption. If a meteor were to wipe out the east coast, you won't lose your data."

Provisioning Databases on Heroku Postgres from Herkou Postgres on Vimeo.

Let's not test that. But you can scope out the features that Heroku and PostgreSQL bring to the table. The pricing starts at $200 a month for the "Ronin" plan that includes a 1.7GB cache and goes all the way up to the "Mecha" plan with a 68GB cache at $6,400 a month.

This seems like a good strategy from Heroku. Customers that already have deployed apps elsewhere can still tap Heroku's platform for PostgreSQL. Maybe they'll pick up new customers over time who will deploy more apps on Heroku's platform, or maybe they'll just get the database business. Either way, it's a win for Heroku if they can get developers in the door. Anybody planning on taking them up on this?

As the name implies, Engine Yard's Labs provides experimental features for users so that the company can get quick feedback from customers. The emphasis is on experimental, though, because there's no promise that support will make its way out to production.

According to Dr. Nic Williams post, "features released through Engine Yard Labs are not officially supported and may or may not become supported as a part of Engine Yard products in the future."

To get access, developers sign up on the early access page and request to have the feature enabled.

Node.js on Engine Yard Cloud from Engine Yard on Vimeo.

Note that pre-supported software is not new to Engine Yards. The company has had alpha and beta features for some time. MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 as well as PostgreSQL 9 are in alpha right now, along with MongoDB and Rubinus. GitHub account linking is currently in beta.

What do you think? Is there enough demand for Node.js for Engine Yard to promote it to the supported platforms? Is it a good idea for PaaS providers to experiment with features they may not roll out at all?