PaaS, CaaS, container management, cloud platform, what do you call that technology you’re using? In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Larry Carvalho, research manager and lead analyst for Platform as a Service at IDC, explains why the term PaaS is actually passè.

Instead of talking about platforms as a service, Larry uses the term “cloud application platform. ”

This cloud platform provides compute abilities, developer services, as well as back-end services. At its core, it has to provide a compute engine that traditionally was provided as a VM, but compute is increasingly done with containers and even as functions. In other words, no matter how an application is packaged, it can still be run on top of a platform.