Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a software development enabler for third-party service providers to provide platforms to their customers, developing and running software applications without having to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure themselves. And can be managed.

Most platforms as a service include templates or build packs. opinion How to build a particular type of application is usually centred around the popular ones. 12-element methodology. This is why PaaS options are often labelled as “opinion” and are ideal for new greenfield applications.

This simplification makes software development faster and easier and hides the underlying compute, storage, database, operating system, and network resources needed to run applications, thus increasing the scope of the developer’s work. It will be reduced. PaaS providers charge for the use of these resources, and in some cases for the use of the platform itself, by the number of applications per user (or “seat”) or hosted.

What makes PaaS

Like other cloud services such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) And Software as a Service (SaaS), PaaS is typically accessed over the Internet, but can also be deployed in on-premises or hybrid mode. In any case, the underlying infrastructure on which the application runs is managed by the service provider. In many cases, customers can decide where to physically host their applications and choose the performance or safety of their environment. Often there are additional costs.

PaaS and IaaS

For many, the PaaS and IaaS debate is settled by the market, but the decision to use the underlying building block itself (IaaS) or the opinionable PaaS is to pursue speed. It is a decision that many people make today. Application to the market.

Benefits of PaaS

One of the biggest benefits of using PaaS is the ability to quickly create and deploy applications. You don’t have to take the hassle to set up and maintain the environment in which your application runs. This, in theory, allows developers to deploy faster and more regularly, allowing them to focus on differentiators rather than solving problems such as infrastructure provisioning.

PaaS is maintained by the service provider and comes with service level contracts and other guarantees, so developers don’t have to worry about cumbersome and repetitive tasks such as patching and upgrading, ensuring the availability and stability of their environment. I can be sure it is expensive. , Although the outage still occurs.

PaaS risk

Most of the risks associated with using PaaS result in a loss of control that professional developers must tolerate by handing over their applications to third-party providers. These risks include information security and data resident concerns, fear of vendor lock-in, and unplanned outages.

With PaaS, some team members may find it confusing because developers have a limited range of changes to their development environment. Failure to change the environment or deploy feature requirements by service providers can lead to enterprises.

PaaS example

Some of the major PaaS providers include Amazon web services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, and Salesforce Heroku. The big three cloud providers on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have all made significant investments over the last decade to facilitate the adoption of their services, integrating their own cloud components to facilitate adoption. The major PaaS options still on the market include:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

One of the first PaaS options, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, enables rapid deployment and management of cloud applications without having to learn about the underlying infrastructure. Elastic Beanstalk handles capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring details automatically.

Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open-source PaaS managed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF). Originally developed by VMware, it was transferred to Pivotal Software, a joint venture between EMC, VMware and General Electric, and then to CFF in 2015. Like OpenShift, Cloud Foundry Kubernetes For orchestration.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a PaaS offering for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centres. Applications are sandboxed, run, and automatically scaled across multiple servers.

Microsoft Azure App Service

Microsoft Azure App Service is a fully managed PaaS that combines various Azure services on a single platform.

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift is a family of PaaS offerings that can host or deploy on-premises in the cloud to build and deploy containerized applications. The flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform. It is an on-premises PaaS built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and built around a Docker container orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes.

Salesforce Heroku

Early very beloved PaaS, Heroku may have gone astray Since being acquired by SaaS giant Salesforce in 2010, Heroku has been part of a wide range of Salesforce platforms for developer tools, supporting a wide range of languages ​​and thousands of developers running applications on them. I will. In fact, to use Heroku, you need to build a common runtime deployed in a virtualized Linux container. Dynos, As Heroku calls them, it’s spread across the dyno grid on AWS servers.

Evolution of PaaS

Platform as a Service has matured into its own important cloud services category, but containers, Serverless computing, and Function as a service (FaaS) option offer many of the same benefits as PaaS, but for portability, flexibility, and serverless computing, it promises an environment where you pay only for what you use.

So Benkepes wrote for Computerworld in 2017, PaaS is widely embedded in container management and automation ideas, and major providers such as Red Hat, VMware, and Big Three cloud providers are properly pivoting towards facilitating container adoption. Kubernetes in recent years.

That doesn’t mean PaaS is dead Inevitably, that PaaS has evolved as the industry has made widespread migration to Kubernetes-coordinated containerized applications. There is always a market that simplifies software development, but the underlying platforms for doing so are changing over time.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nikoleta Yanakieva Editor at DevStyleR International