For the last few weeks, an interesting and timely debate has been brewing among the technology press and various technology vendors and users about whether or not platform as a service, or PaaS, will survive as an independent cloud computing service category.

NetworkWorld’s Brandon Butler asked if “the PaaS market is dying as we know it”. Long-time cloud bloggers David Linthicum and Reuven Cohen concurred with Butler’s theory that PaaS was being absorbed into the IaaS and SaaS categories. This was met with counterarguments from EMC’s JP Morgenthal and Red Hat’s Krishnan Subramanian that PaaS is indeed a key service catagory.

I think this discussion is worth commenting on largely because it highlights the distinction between what services exist in the cloud and how those services are acquired. This is a common confusion, in part because the distinction is occasionally detrimental to various vendors’ attempts to differentiate themselves, and…