PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is your cloud application development and deployment environment, and the portability of your cloud computing application depends on the portability of the PaaS platform that you select.

Application portability has been a fundamental tenet for software developers since the emergence of UNIX and Linux. Think of the right PaaS as a “Linux for the cloud” giving you portability and flexibility across hardware infrastructure deployments. Portability ensures you can always select the optimal infrastructure-as-a-service provider based on business priorities such as cost, security, or service levels.

An open and portable cloud computing application can be deployed to any type of cloud (e.g., public, private or hybrid) and any cloud IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) provider (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Hosting.com etc).  Cloud computing is still maturing and debates are raging about what constitutes “open” cloud computing. Don’t worry about the machinations of standards committees; the acid test of open cloud computing is being able to easily move your application between cloud infrastructure providers. For all practical purposes open cloud computing is portable cloud computing.

Your key to developing a portable cloud application is to build your application on a portable PaaS such as Cloud Foundry or Open Stack. These platforms decouple your cloud application development environment from the IaaS provider giving you’re application the maximum deployment flexibility. Both of these platforms are open source and portable to any cloud hosting provider. Don’t get caught building proprietary services from your infrastructure provider into your application. Yyou will get locked-in to that provider and sacrifice the future portability of your application.

Have you considered a PaaS for your application development? Was application portability a consideration in your evaluation?