I actually tend to agree with @Ben that while were going to see third party services available through PaaS it wouldn’t make sense to have the PaaS the gatekeeper for those services and those services and marketplace need be served independently from the PaaS provider to allow better choice between PaaS provider and Cloud provider

I also tend to agree with Ben that tools like enStratus, Chef or Puppet is a good example for enabling those services.

Cloudify takes a different approach on that regard in which it integrates with Chef to offer third party services into any cloud. In this way you can still have the benefit of PaaS but your not locked into specific cloud platform and you have a choice to pick your third party services of choice.

More on this here : Putting DevOps & PaaS together ( http://ht.ly/en5jY )

In the infrastructure space we’ve reached a fairly common acceptance (well at least those not wedded to a “single vendor for everything” strategy) that the future will be homogeneous with organizations leveraging the services of different cloud stacks, different hypervisors and different fundamental approaches depending on the needs of the particular business unit or workload in question. This is summarized by my contention that if we know anything, it is that the future is heterogeneous.

So let’s look at that for a second. Core infrastructure, delivered by seasoned IT practitioners who have the time and skills to wrangle solutions to fit a particular type of plumbing, will be heterogeneous in nature. Well if we accept that fact, how on earth do we expect one PaaS solution to meet the needs of every different use case and business unit within the organization? The fact is, the further one goes up the tack, the less likely it is that one solution will meet all the organizational needs. By extension, and logically following that thesis, clearly PaaS, like IaaS will be heterogeneous in nature.

If that is in fact the case, is it really either appropriate or effective for the PaaS vendor to be the gatekeeper to the services the applications on the PaaS uses? Or the management of the Paas workloads? It seems to me not. In the same way that an organization’s infrastructural management is ideally managed by a third party service such as enStratus, so to are an organization’s PaaS assets, the services that plug into those PaaS’ and the different instances of all the different PaaS’ that the origination uses most ideally delivered by a third party provider.

More on this to come…

Read more here: http://www.activestate.com/blog/2012/05/new-stackato-app-store

The only other provider I think really comes close to offering the range of features Amazon does is Softlayer, and they don’t have significant mindshare, especially not in the cloud services arena even though they have some excellent and in many cases, better products.

So it makes sense for other PaaS/IaaS providers to set up marketplaces because this is an easy way to show their users where they can go to get these kind of services if they don’t provide them themselves. But I’d argue this would only be a stopgap because they do ultimately have to provide something…and then the risk for these services of the big provider taking their product remains. That’s the risk of building on someone else’s platform.

> We expect cloud services curation to be one among several rich strategic opportunities on the horizon for PaaS vendors as the PaaS market transitions from nascent to mature.

Now think of the advantage of using semantic technology in cloud services curation ;)