One of the debates/conversations going on right now in the cloud is the value and virtue of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS).
There are lots of different ways to think about the pros and cons of both. To a laymen, you can summarize these arguments as follows; PaaS cares more about the future and less so about the past, where as IaaS cares more about the past, and makes compromises on the makeup of the future. IaaS is concerned with giving you infrastructure in which you can run legacy applications as is, but still get benefits of the cloud such as utilization / elastisicty etc. On the other hand PaaS doesn't offer a direct solution to legacy applications and as such you will need to invest time and resources in customizing them for a PaaS platform. The payback from this is that you should be able to see lower infrastructure costs and greater web scale performance.
The reason this is the case is as follows. Traditionally, customers have had to work on their hardware layers to provide High Availability (HA) of their applications, think RAID, SAN, Redundancy, Live Migration etc. This all costs money, both in terms of expensive hardware and a requirement for highly skilled staff to maintain it.
PaaS platforms on the other hand are designed in such a way that hardware failure is expected and as such the software on these platforms in designed in such a way that system integrity will not be comprised if parts of the hardware footprint should go down. The hardware itself based is highly standardized low cost commodity kit. Its designed to be so cheap and simple that it can be easily repaired or replaced at a much lower TCO than would be obtainable using specialized highly complex kit.
On the other hand IaaS must be designed in such a way that the hardware is failure tolerant as assumptions about the applications failure tolerance cannot be made.
I'm going to be spending a lot of time working with cloud computing solutions and I'll post my thoughts here.
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