{"id":624,"date":"2015-07-10T14:04:58","date_gmt":"2015-07-10T18:04:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/?p=624"},"modified":"2018-07-05T17:08:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-05T21:08:23","slug":"explaining-the-cloud-what-the-heck-is-paas-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/solutionsreview.com\/cloud-platforms\/explaining-the-cloud-what-the-heck-is-paas-anyway\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining the Cloud: What the Heck is PaaS Anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PaaSheader\"<\/a>The enterprise is in the middle of an explosion of growth in mobility and data. The old, insular model for developing \u201cin-house\u201d solutions is showing its age\u2014in many cases on-premise<\/a> IT simply can\u2019t keep up. For the last decade, cloud computing<\/a> has been gaining traction, and now it\u2019s finally set to surpass on-premise solutions in IT spending.<\/p>\n

In the past, enterprise cloud adoption was primarily focused on software as a service (SaaS<\/a>) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS<\/a>) offerings, but lately there\u2019s been an increasing call for enterprise adoption of the middle sibling of the cloud family: platform as a service (PaaS).<\/p>\n

So what is PaaS? And why is it so important?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a model of cloud computing in which a vendor provides the user with the hardware and software tools necessary to create, deploy and manage applications<\/a> at scale<\/a> via the internet, as a service.\u00a0 Here\u2019s how renowned IT research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc.<\/a> defines PaaS in their IT glossary:<\/p>\n

\u201cA [PaaS] offering, usually depicted in all cloud diagrams between the SaaS layer above it and the IaaS layer below, is a broad collection of application infrastructure<\/a> (middleware<\/a>) services (including application platform, integration, business process management, and database<\/a> services). However, the hype surrounding the PaaS concept is focused mainly on application PaaS as the representative of the whole category.\u201d<\/p>\n

PaaS solutions are made up of three components:<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The Software Stack<\/strong>, or simply \u2018the stack\u2019 is the layer of software that your application runs on. All of the libraries, frameworks, and services that a developer uses to build an application are included in the stack. This includes things like the application framework, the HTTP server, language virtual machine<\/a> (VM), databases, load balancers, etc.<\/p>\n

A PaaS will likely have multiple stack combinations to choose from, with each one tailored to different languages and frameworks, and it\u2019s important to choose a solution\u00a0that offers a stack that is compatible with your developers\u2019 preferred languages, frameworks, and methods.<\/p>\n

A PaaS solution\u2019s deployment machinery<\/strong> creates instances of virtual servers and provisions them with your stack and your application code. This machinery is code built from a combination of scripts and web services.<\/p>\n

The user interface (UI) <\/strong>\u00a0is the way a PaaS is organized and presented to the user in order to make its use easy and flexible. PaaS users need the ability to hide features that they don\u2019t need or want to change, and to make their desired configurations highly available. A PaaS may provide a web graphical user interface (GUI), or command line interface (CLI), or both.<\/p>\n

Reducing Complexity: The Benefits of PaaS<\/strong><\/h4>\n

PaaS eliminates the complexity and cost of buying, configuring, and managing the hardware and software needed for on-premise application development, and reduces the time-to-value compared to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) by greatly simplifying configuration and deployment. Here are some of the top advantages gained by using PaaS:<\/p>\n