Cloud platforms are an essential aspect of cloud computing. Many organizations rely on external service providers that run cloud applications, SaaS applications, and provide cloud platforms. Organizations in some cases, bring cloud platform technologies on-premises in the form of private clouds.
Cloud platforms today offer a very wide range of services like the advent of usage-based pricing, letting you pay for what you use, rather than having a server dedicated to you full time, you could instead rent virtual machines by the hour or by the minute, rent data storage by the gigabyte, and so on. Usage-based pricing was a real innovation of cloud platforms. The global scale that the major cloud platform providers bring is phenomenal. Data centers are much bigger than conventional hosters. This scale provides a number of benefits, such as the ability to keep costs very low.
The most fundamental cloud platform compute technology is called Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS. The cloud platform provides VM images where a user can create and use virtual machines, leading platforms support both Windows and Linux.
This is useful for all, for example, a developer might build a new application in IaaS VMs, or might move an existing on-premises application, either a packaged app or a custom app, from your on-premises data center onto a cloud platform. They’re just virtual machines. So just as apps can run on-premises in VMs, they can often, although not quite always, run unchanged in IaaS VMs.
