Platform as a Service History

PaaS, or platform as a service to use the full name, is a type of cloud computing. In fact, it is one of three types of cloud computing: Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service. PaaS is a type of cloud computing that, according to Wikipedia, "allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing platform and one or more applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching the application(s); and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles." Basically, infrastructure is provided over the internet that allows you to build and maintain applications for yourself or whatever company you are designing the application for. There are three well-known ways for cloud computing service providers to give their customers a PaaS service:

- private service (such as software or appliance that allows other applications to be built on top of them) are provided to users, but underlying infrastructure and certain services are protected behind a firewall

- public cloud service where the provider gives users the the networks, servers, storage, operating system, any required middleware (ex: Java runtime, .NET runtime, integration, etc.), database, and other services to host the consumer's application.

The first public PaaS cloud computing service was called Zimki which was launched by Fotango, a London-based corporation that was owned by Canon Europe. The platform was originally developed in 2005 and it had a beta launch in March 2006. Later that year at EuroOSCON, the service was launched for the general public to use. What was Zimki exactly? It was an end-to-end cloud platform for the development of JavaScript web apps and programs for utility computing. This service also removed some of the more repetitive tasks involved in the process of creating JavaScript web apps and online services. Zimki automated most of the infrastructure and operations it was working with so even Fotango did not have to do much to maintain this PaaS service. Even from provisioning to setting virtual servers, scaling, configuration, security and backups were provided automatically by Zimki. Zimki was released with the tagline "Pre-Shaved Yaks" to describe the removal of repetitive tasks. It was also a pure "pay as you go" code execution platform. Applications could be built or deploy without any kind of start-up costs, all of which would be maintained on an online computing platform. Customers would be charged based on how much they used storage, the amount of network traffic their apps got, and JSOPs (the amount of JavaScript operations). the service grew and was very profitable, but Fotango closed Zimki in 2007 since it was not what the business wanted to focus on. When Zimki closed, it had several thousand developer accounts while also showing the perils of what happens when services like this are provided by a single company or corporation. The end of Zimki seemed like the end of an era when it comes to developments of cloud computing and Zimki was not open source, so the code could not be utilized by other people or organizations for developing any kind of similar system.

In April 2008, Google created a PaaS system and launched it to 10,000 developers. The system was called App Engine and this PaaS platform is still available to this day. Google was said to have successfully "turned the Internet cloud computing space into a fully-fledged industry virtually overnight." according to Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNet. App Engine has alternatives that are Open PaaS, a platform as a service system that is also open source, allowing anyone to take the code to create a similar system for others to use. These alternatives include systems like the environment Typhon App Engine which you can find here: https://code.google.com/archive/p/typhoonae/