The document summarizes research done at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center on evaluating Hadoop platforms as a service (PaaS) compared to infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Key findings include: - Provider (Azure HDInsight, Rackspace CBD, etc.) did not significantly impact performance of wordcount and terasort benchmarks. - Data size and number of datanodes were more important factors, with diminishing returns on performance from adding more nodes. - PaaS can save on maintenance costs compared to IaaS but may be more expensive depending on workload and VM size needed. Tuning may still be required with PaaS.