PaaS

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. PaaS can be delivered in two ways: as a public cloud service from a provider, where the consumer controls software deployment with minimal configuration options, and the provider provides the networks, servers, storage, OS, 'middleware' (e.g. Java runtime, .NET runtime, integration, etc.), database and other services to host the consumer's application; or as a private service (software or appliance) inside the firewall, or as software deployed on a public infrastructure as a service.

Fotango, a London-based (Old Street) company owned by Canon Europe launched the world's first public platform as a service known as 'Zimki'. It was developed in 2005 with a beta launch in March 2006 and a public launch at EuroOSCON in 2006. Zimki was an end-to-end JavaScript web application development and utility computing platform that removed all the repetitive tasks encountered when creating web applications and web services. All aspects of infrastructure and operations from provisioning and setting up virtual servers, scaling, configuration, security and backups were done automatically by Zimki. Zimki introduced the tagline '' to describe the removal of all these repetitive tasks.

Zimki was a pure 'pay as you go' code execution platform which enabled developers to build and deploy applications or web services without incurring any start-up costs on a true utility based computing platform. Charging was done on storage used, network traffic and JSOPs (Javascript Operations). It provided a multi-tenant platform where developers could create entire applications (front and back end through SSJS) by using a single language - Javascript, with all development, billing, monitoring and application control exposed through APIs and a range of component services from a NoSQL object store to Message Queue services. Furthermore, all functions within Zimki could be exposed as web services and Zimki provided billing analysis down to individual functions.

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