The notion of the cloud has certainly evolved from some abstract definition of shared resources into a model whereby infrastructures have differentiated themselves from platforms. That is, while one might group Amazon and Google into cloud providers, their solutions are vastly different. AWS remains an infrastructure as a service while GAE is a platform as a service. Each model has its benefits and disadvantages, yet, there clearly appears to be a preference, in terms of business models, towards platforms as services. Thus, it was an immense pleasure to chat with Sacha Labourey, the former CTO of JBoss, who has teamed up with a squad of gurus to start CloudBees.

In this podcast hosted by IBM developerWorks, Sacha argues that a complete set of tools for the application life cycle in the cloud is key to maximizing this new computing model —
and besting GAE in the platform-as-a-service space. Sacha’s view of the cloud is an evolved one: viewing the cloud as a bunch of machines for hosting applications solves no real problems; however, viewing the cloud as a service enabler whereby platforms exist to handle the minutia of infrastructures is the future and where the enterprise will look for solutions. Have a listen and check out CloudBees while you are at it!