PAAS – Platform as a Service

PAAS means ‘platform as a service’ and is one cloud computing approach for the processing of big data and building such applications. Such services offer a software platform for the creation of your own applications or services. The basic software artefacts required are typically already existing but users need to tailor them to the service they want to offer. This is often realized by having certain virtual images ready to deploy for the user software. It provides also often development tools and frameworks for software engineers. As such those platforms are primarily not tailored towards application end-users but are tailored to be used by application developers. The platforms are stable and online reachable and typically do not need any on-site computing resources except a laptop for access. The benefit for companies is therefore to save costs avoiding the hosting and maintenance of servers as well as creating basic software artefacts that those platforms offer to be re-used in several applications. On the other side it may lead to vendor-locks with respect to freedom, costs, and risks being unable to choose another PAAS vendor once a suitable PAAS solution is used for years. Cloud computing providers offer services on three different levels: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PAAS, and Software as a Service (SaaS).

PAAS Examples

The examples show that this type of cloud computing has become very popular today. One example is Salesforce Heroku that enables developers to build, deliver, monitor and elastically scale commercial applications and apps. It provides the underlying hardware infrastructure and offers Support for languages such as Node, Ruby, Java, Scala and PHP. The design of this PAAS solution is driven by providing companies with a toolset to create apps very quickly. Other examples are the AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Engine Yard, the Microsoft Azure platform, and the Google App Engine.

More Information about PAAS

A nice introduction to this topic is given by the following video:

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