Platform as a service is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing
platform and a solution stack as a service.
Along with software as a service and infrastructure as a service, it is a service model of cloud
computing.
In this model, the consumer creates an application or service using tools and/or libraries from
the provider.
The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings.
The provider provides the networks, servers, storage, and other services that are required
to host the consumer's application.
PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications or services without the cost
and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning
hosting capabilities.
All "as-a-service" offerings are characterized as providing low initial cost, incremental
cost as your service usage grows, self-service, best practices built-in, resource sharing,
automated deployment, management services, lifecycle management, reuse.
PaaS provides these capabilities for application and service development.
There are various types of PaaS vendors; however, all offer application hosting and a deployment
environment, along with various integrated services.
Services offer varying levels of scalability and maintenance.
PaaS offerings may also include facilities for application design, application development,
testing, and deployment as well as services such as team collaboration, web service integration,
and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management,
application versioning, application instrumentation, and developer community facilitation.
Besides the service engineering aspects, PaaS offerings include mechanisms for service management,
such as monitoring, workflow management, discovery, reservation, etc.
There are a number of reasons why PaaS is experiencing fast market adoption.
Today, there are compelling economics around these offerings.
Not only does PaaS allow IT teams to do much more with what they have; it also reduces
development time - in some instances by as much as 50 percent.
Add to this the fact that the market is now maturing and you can start to see why organizations
are seeking out PaaS options.
Types Add-on development facilities
These facilities customization of existing software-as-a-service applications, and in
some ways are the equivalent of macro language customization facilities provided with packaged
software applications such as Lotus Notes, or Microsoft Word.
Often these require PaaS developers and their users to purchase subscriptions to the co-resident
SaaS application.
Stand alone development environments Stand-alone PaaS environments do not include
technical, licensing or financial dependencies on specific SaaS applications or web services,
and are intended to provide a generalized development environment.
Application delivery-only environments Delivery-only PaaS offerings do not include
development, debugging and test capabilities as part of the service, though they may be
supplied offline.
The services provided generally focus on security and on-demand scalability.
Open platform as a service This type of PaaS does not include hosting
as such, rather it provides open source software to allow a PaaS provider to run applications.
For example, AppScale allows a user to deploy some applications written for Google App Engine
to their own servers, providing datastore access from a standard SQL or NoSQL database.
Some open platforms let the developer use any programming language, any database, any
operating system, any server, etc. to deploy their applications.
Mobile PaaS The Yankee Group recently identified mobile
PaaS as one of its themes for 2014, naming a number of providers including Kinvey, AnyPresence,
FeedHenry, FatFractal and Point.io.
Examples AppearIQ
AppScale AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Cloud Foundry CloudControl
Engine Yard Google App Engine
Heroku Nodejitsu
OpenShift OutSystems
Salesforce WaveMaker
Windows Azure Websites See also
Software as a service Infrastructure as a service
Network as a service References