Three categories of cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS)) has been debated and accepted in the industry. However, these categories appear to blur from the perspective of the developers that deploy applications to the cloud. In addition, as IaaS vendors add abstractions to their environment and SaaS vendors expose their platforms for developers, a better discussion of PaaS is needed. This discussion needs to take into account the levels of abstractions provided in a platform, the barriers to entry, the skill set required from the developers and the kind of applications that can be developed.

In this talk, we will explore the shift in developer experience as a result of the shift to PaaS. Starting with a comparison of development models for Cloud Computing versus traditional software development, we will then discuss a taxonomy with respect to developer experience expectations for PaaS. Along the way we will discuss languages and APIs, application life cycle, infrastructure support/abstraction, elasticity and scalability and debugging and management within this taxonomy using comparisons among Force.com, Google App Engine and Microsoft's Windows Azure.

Keywords: Cloud development, Development Environments

Target Audience: Application Developers that are evaluating cloud environments and their capabilities