Recent commentaries by cloud industry luminaries Reuven Cohen & Krishnan Subramanian address key issues related to relative importance and potential longevity of an independent Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). In his commentary, Reuven poses, «Do consumers really care about the difference between IaaS and PaaS?» The answer to this question is most likely, no, but that doesn’t eliminate the need for distinction, it merely is a matter of how best to deliver the value of cloud computing to users.
In his commentary, Krishnan does an excellent job of exploring one way to classify PaaS as either service or container orchestration. However, in some ways, the distinction introduces more confusion. For example, his use of Docker illustrates how convergence of IaaS and PaaS actually makes sense for the industry and, thus, diminishes his key point that there’s value in the cloud application layer existing as a distinct layer within the cloud stack.