Analysts and industry watchers predict that the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions will soon be the fastest growing sector of cloud services.  Many developers welcome the benefits offered by companies like Heroku and Microsoft Azure. However, the leaders in the companies that employ these developers aren’t often not quite as enthusiastic about moving to a PaaS. Apprenda’s has launched ApprendaCloud  to help developers make their case.

When Apprenda launched in 2007, it offered a public PaaS platform. However,the service never gained much traction.  The company discontinued its PaaS 2008, pivoted and began selling the .NET platform it created so organizations could create their own PaaS implementations. Now, Apprenda is getting back in the public cloud business – kinda.

ApprendaCloud is a free, public PaaS instance that allows developers to experiment and test Apprenda’s features without the headache of getting access and permission to install it within their organization’s data center. Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller has made it clear the intent is not to compete with the many PaaS platforms that have flooded the market. Schuller said,

“Predominantly, we expect it to be used for testing. We’re not going to make a production ready platform,” he says. “But if someone ran an app there that they considered production, there’s nothing we could do to stop them.”

Developers can get started by completing three fields – first name, last name and email address and there is no charge for using the service. Once developers receive log-in information that can begin create their own multi-tenant solutions using the many configuration options within Apprenda.

Why would organizations want a PaaS framework instead of an actual PaaS? If could allow them to build self-service applications. For example if two divisions use the same application, but one has slightly separate needs, organizations could avoid building or customizing two solutions by treating the departments the same way a software-as-a-service application would handle two customers. It will be interesting to see if Apprenda’s second foray into the public cloud will go better than its first attempt.