ABSTRACT
Platform as a Service is a new label for virtualizing entire machines and systems. The point is that the project lead quite literally rented a couple of thousand machines that were all running the indexing software, thereby churning out the back issue indexing project in a weekend, and then walked away once it was done. Machine-to-machine communications have become standardized to the point where it has started to become commonplace for home appliances to have programming interfaces for integration into larger systems. Software developers have always wanted a “draft site” so that they could test their systems in a live environment, but getting management to approve a duplicate system was, for many organizations, a fantasy. System prototyping on workstations can include virtual appliances such as firewalls, remote-access gateways, load balancers, virtual networks, and just about anything information technology professionals be likely to have on their physical network.
