Over the last few months, Platform as a Service has moved out of the shadows to become big news in the cloud world. Here is a quick roundup of recent events:

• RedHat acquires Makara: this is a great move by RedHat, who has been hitherto a peripheral player in the great cloud game. Makara gives RedHat a platform that makes it much easier for developers to deploy cloud applications while also providing rich debugging capabilities. The Makara founding team came from Wily and brings deep understanding of application lifecycle management for cloud applications.
• Cloudbees gets funding for a Java PaaS: this breathes life into the Java PaaS market, bringing the same kinds of turnkey cloud management to the Java community that Engine Yard and Heroku bring to the Ruby on Rails Market. Cloudbees was founded by the former CTO of JBoss and has tied their Java PaaS to the Hudson

The first phase of cloud computing was focused on the hardware side of things and Infrastructure as a Service. In order for cloud computing to gain widespread adoption, a software management layer is required to simplify the process for deploying and managing applications in the cloud.