Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is still a novel but rapidly growing segment in the cloud computing market, offering an abstracted development and deployment environment that can simplify the life of a developer in any domain. However, unlike Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), we are not dealing simply with raw compute and storage, but often a customised environment that builds on innovation more than IaaS commodity focused offerings.
This brings to light larger complications in interoperability, and particularly for PaaS, the concept of application portability. Developers and SaaS providers can benefit greatly from PaaS, but are often weary of the making an “all eggs in one basket” investment in a particular platform as-a-Service model, as well as the fear of finding themselves in a situation of vendor lock-in or incompatibility with other adopted solutions in parallel.
This is where SeaClouds comes into play, interconnecting public and private clouds vendors for the developer to help compare, manage and migrate between vendors. SeaClouds offers an open-source added value feature set for Clouds customers: developers and SaaS providers oriented towards SMEs, large industry or the public sector. Cloud providers can also leverage the benefits of being part of a larger ecosystem: gaining greater visibility and wider compatibility of third-party services via their existing API.