Cloud computing-Platform as a service(PaaS) and its advantages

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provide acomputing platform and a solution stack as a service. PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning, hosting capabilities, providing all of the facilities required to support the complete life cycle of building and delivering web applications and services entirely available from the Internet.

(Definition:Wikipedia)

To understand concept better,consider the situation below:

If you want to travel from one place to another,then you have to

• Buy your own car
• Maintain it properly
• Deal with accidents
• Pay for the insurance
• Navigate on your own
• Tolerate the heavy traffic

If you travel the "PaaS" style,then

• You can pay a taxi driver or travel via airline
• Configure your trip
• Enjoy various entertainments like movie,wifi,etc
• And arrive safely!

You don’t have to worry about your car or accidents or traffic and you can enjoy your journey

The Platform as a service stack consists of five layers…

• Innovation services
• lifestyle services
• operational services
• application services
• infrastructure services

When choosing a platform as a service,in addition to the above attributes you have to select the service which is trustworthy as the life of the business relies on it.

• Multi tenant:In a cloud based platform,there are multiple users,each having multiple active projects
• Scalability is looked after by the sys admins when the project is deployed
• The monitoring ability is integrated into the development platform
• Billing is done based on usage

• Iaas abstracts away the cost of hardware infrastructure but does not remove the complexity of software infrastructure which includes managing various processes involving database,appserver,massaging and tools.
• PaaS is different removing the complexity of both hardware and software.
• The advantages of PaaS over IaaS are

1. There is no software stack to manage
2. Availability of Automatic updates
3. Scales up with automatic elasticity
4. There is an application ecosystem which contains pre-available applications which one can subscribe to.

• Decreased operational costs and increased productivity
• Requires no initial investments
• Centralized information management
• Access to information available anytime and anywhere
• Opens new opportunity,reach and scale
• Lets you to be agile

• Zero infrastructure
• Lower risk and lower cost
• Increased profit
• Easy & quick development
• Lets you focus on innovation
• Potential for general developers to build web applications without needing specialized expertise

Some of the Platform as a service(PaaS)
providers are

1. Appengine
2. Force.com
3. Bungee connect
4. Longjump

So in a nutshell,I say that

"PaaS DEMOCRATIZES SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT"

To know more about cloud computing and its types,visit the link below

What is meant by cloud computing?

What is cloud computing?