The VMforce collaboration is VMware’s first public implementation of Platform-as-a-Service (abbreviated as “PaaS”). PaaS offerings aim to make developers incredibly efficient by hiding many of the complexities that they face in typical enterprise IT environments such as:
* Waiting for the provisioning of physical machines and their software
* Changing your code to work with the specific middleware components your company uses
* Handling code modifications that may be required as the middleware versions change
* Dealing with new environments as your code moves from development to staging to production
* Frustrating interactions with the separate operations team when things aren’t working well
PaaS offerings typically offer add-on services available for developers to incorporate into their applications. These include capabilities such as location-based services, identity management, tweeting, chatter, search, and many forms of data storage. The developer efficiency and application richness to be gained through PaaS offerings is clear and we see it as one of the major trends in cloud computing. Today’s PaaS offerings are not without challenges though, and we believe VMware is in a unique position to attack these challenges and help bring PaaS to the mainstream.
