Skytap is occasionally asked how our service overlaps with provisioning and deployment tools like Puppet and Chef. While those tools do have some conceptual overlap both with each other and with Skytap, their roles are fairly distinct in practice.
Skytap’s service provides environments on demand for complex enterprise applications. We give our customers the ability to easily create, clone, share, and collaborate with these environments while maintaining tight IT visibility and control for security, compliance, and budgetary purposes. What is a “complex application”? Usually it is some type of N-tier client/server app designed to run on traditional infrastructure—perhaps a line-of-business or customer facing application. They’re not often designed to run in an IaaS or PaaS cloud platform. Check out the video below to get a better sense.