Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for implementing an independent services platform. One of the methods includes maintaining a first software platform system configured to host user-provided computing tasks in a cloud computing environment of a distributed computing system. A services platform system configured to host services in the cloud computing environment of the distributed computing system is also maintained, wherein the second services platform system is configured to provision independent service resources in the underlying cloud computing infrastructure, and launch one or more service instances of the service using the provisioned independent service resources in the underlying cloud computing infrastructure. The second services platform system is configured to receive a bind request from a user and to provide binding information to one or more computing tasks hosted by the first software platform system upon receiving the bind request.