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WHITE PAPER

Selecting a Cloud Platform: A Platform as a Service Scorecard

As an application platform in the Cloud, Platform as a Service (PaaS) should facilitate Cloud characteristics (i.e. elastic scale, on-demand self service, resource pooling, and consumption based pricing). While all middleware vendors purport to deliver a platform product or service powering the Cloud, all PaaS offerings do not deliver appropriate granularity, abstraction, capabilities, simplicity, and solution breadth.

A competitive scorecard can help enterprise architects and solution architects evaluate and select PaaS offerings. The scorecard can be used to shortlist PaaS providers, build questions posed in a Request for Proposal (RFP) document, or generate use case scenarios. This white paper presents a scorecard that contains comparison tables describing detailed criterion and a comparison chart visually illustrating PaaS strengths and weaknesses.

When your team is selecting a PaaS provider, road-test the PaaS offerings and validate benefits. At a minimum, become comfortable with your team’s ability to realize goals, measure improvements using key metrics, and confidently design, build, deploy, and manage cloud-enabled applications. The white paper presents a quick start roadmap.