Chapter opener image: © JBOY/Shutterstock

Many companies that deploy applications to the cloud will need a specific platform, such as Windows, .NET, and Microsoft SQL, or Linux, Perl, and MySQL. For those companies, utilizing a platform as a service (PaaS) solution eliminates the company’s need to administer the operating system and supporting software. Other companies, because of security needs or a desire to manage all resources, turn to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. An IaaS provider makes all the computing hardware resources available, and the customer, in turn, is responsible for installing and managing the systems, which they can normally do, for the most part, over the Internet.