Comprehensive analysis of Platform as a Service cloud model highlighting abstraction levels development environments API integration and strategic application development use cases
Platform as a Service, commonly referred to as PaaS, is a cloud computing model that provides customers with a complete platform to develop, deploy, manage, and run applications. The PaaS provider hosts everything: servers, networks, storage, operating systems, application runtimes, APIs, middleware, databases, and other tools at their data center. The provider also takes responsibility for the installation, configuration, and operation of the application infrastructure, leaving the user responsible only for the application code and its maintenance. Customers pay for this service on a usage basis and purchase resources on demand.
PaaS clouds are distinguished by the high level of abstraction they provide to users, eliminating the complexity of deploying applications, configuring infrastructure, and provisioning supporting technologies like load balancers and databases. PaaS clouds provide services and APIs that simplify the job of developers in delivering elastically scalable and highly available cloud applications. These services typically include capabilities such as APIs for distributing, caching, queuing, messaging, file and data storage, workload management, user identity, and analytics.
The PaaS runtime environment executes end-user code according to policies set by the application owner and cloud provider. Many PaaS offerings provide developers with rapid deployment mechanisms for deploying and running applications. PaaS supports a range of application infrastructure or middleware capabilities such as application servers, database management systems, business analytics servers, mobile backend services, integration services, business process management systems, rules engines, and complex event processing systems.
PaaS is used to build, test, deploy, enhance, and scale applications rapidly and cost-effectively.
Organizations use PaaS to develop, run, manage, and secure APIs and microservices, which are loosely coupled, independently deployable components and services.
PaaS supports a broad range of application environments, programming languages, and tools used for IoT deployments.
PaaS tools allow organizations to analyze their data to find business insights that enable more informed business decisions and predictions.
Organizations use PaaS to access BPM platforms delivered as a service.
Organizations leverage PaaS to provide a single point of reference for critical business data, such as information about customer transactions and analytical data to support decision-making.
PaaS offers rapid allocation and deallocation of resources with a pay-as-you-use model.
APIs, services, and middleware capabilities provided by PaaS assist developers in focusing on application development and testing, resulting in faster time-to-market for products and services.
PaaS platforms allow experimentation with multiple operating systems, languages, and tools without significant investment, enabling faster, easier, and less risky adoption of a wider range of resources.
Some key PaaS offerings available in the market today include AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Cloud Foundry, IBM Cloud Paks, Windows Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, Magento Commerce Cloud, force.com, and Apache Stratos.
PaaS comes with risks common to all cloud offerings, such as information security threats and dependency on the service provider’s infrastructure. Services can be impacted when a provider’s infrastructure experiences downtime. Customers also have no direct control over changes made by the provider in its strategy, service offerings, or tools. However, the benefits can far outweigh these risks.
PaaS continues to experience strong growth and is predicted to become the prevailing platform delivery model moving forward.