Platform as a Service

Platform as a service (PaaS) (also known as cloudware) is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet &mdash; with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers or end-users.

PaaS offerings include workflow facilities for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation. These services are provisioned as an integrated solution over the web.

A second definiton of PaaS is more client-oriented. PaaS can be defined as the concept to deliver a cost-effective cloud-based workspace environment &mdash; the platform &mdash; to the end-user which integrates work/life environment and facilitates him or/her to work, communicate, interact and play (games) anywhere, anytime, any device in a safe manner based on the roles assigned to the end-user. As such PaaS could also be described as Datacenter Centric Client Based Utility Computing.