Chapter 1. What's a PaaS and Why CloudBees?

Cloud being the new buzzword, getting a correct definition is complex, and you can be lost trying to choose the best Cloud offers available on the Internet for [put your favorite stuff here]-vendors. Even talking about actual cloud implementations is difficult since there are multiple levels of them.

The concept of the Cloud is about the ability to get resources on demand without limits, but with the related cost, and without delays or human operation. Amazon Web Services is one of the most popular Cloud services, and with an adequate account set, anyone can get an EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance running to host applications or use an S3 (Simple Storage Service) bucket to store files.

Cloud services are commonly organized into three categories namely, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS).