Understanding PaaS
by Michael P. McGrath
2012-01-12 First release
For years, I worked as the Fedora Project’s infrastructure team lead. It was quite possibly the best job I’ll ever have. People were constantly coming up with new ideas and
as the keeper of resources, they’d come to the infrastructure team to put those ideas
into motion. Looking back, I have regret. It’s about how many of those ideas I had to
say no to just because there weren’t enough people or servers to go around. So many
projects just never got off the ground because of the high cost of innovation.
With all those never born projects in mind, I joined Red Hat’s cloud computing initiative to make OpenShift a reality. OpenShift is Red Hat’s Platform as a Service (PaaS)
offering and it’s the answer to so many problems I’ve had in the past, like those Fedora
Project ideas that never got off the ground.
Yet, even months after OpenShift launched, I am constantly surprised how often people
would ask me what PaaS is. Is it virtualization? Is it just cloud computing? Why would
I use it? This book is the result of the questions so many people have asked me at
conferences, on IRC, and via email. So to all of you curious and hardworking inventors
out there, thank you. I hope the answers contained in this book will help you innovate
even better.
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