Cloud Marketplace and Progress of Cloud Computing

Cloud Marketplace is a concept which has resemblance with App Store. These online storefronts are becoming more important in Cloud market. App Store by Apple is basically the GUI of Apple’s package manager. Cloud Marketplace is currently present as Rackspace Cloud Marketplace, AWS Marketplace, Oracle Marketplace, Microsoft Windows Azure Marketplace, Salesforce.com’s AppExchange etceteras.

A cloud marketplace is like a classic online store selling categorized products divided in to various categories with must present fields providing information about the product, customer review etcetera. In case of cloud marketplace the products are either applications or service. They can be free or paid.

As the users are becoming more used with the App Store like interface, they are easy for the customers to understand the compatible or officially certified Applications for the particular infrastructure. It potentially avoids the middleman factor – somewhat like WordPress Plugins.

Cloud Marketplace Complete the Cloud Service Catalogue by The Original Provider

Cloud marketplace gradually becoming part of the standard service catalogue by most of the cloud providers.  The variety of the major providers such as Rackspace, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce – like we mentioned above has own separate subdomain. The basic idea is to show own customers the compatible third-party technologies that work together with the infrastructure of the IaaS provider and thus strengthen their own market position. Cloud marketplaces is the logical development of cloud computing to enable enterprises and developers an easy access to extend the IT infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift, for example presented a Marketplace concept for an API based ecosystem with services or softwares from the partners to use on the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Possibly this concept was first introduced by Heroku Cloud with a different name – Heroku Add-ons. Unlike classic Marketplace, most Application or add on providers from Marketplace gives a bit extra free tier of usage for the original service user. Marketplace itself is a successful business model since past few thousand years.