Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): A new Frontier

In the recent past, most of the IT oriented people were thinking that the cloud computing paradigm is only a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS).

- Vijay Deep Shukla

However, after the release of Heroku, Windows Azure, AWS (Amazon web Services), and Google App-Engine people have become more and more well known to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Gap between IaaS and SaaS has been filled by PaaS and it allows application owners to still own and implement their own applications without depending on basic IT infrastructure.

PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, provides a complete, flexible and cost-effective cloud platform for developing, running and managing applications.

PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, is a cloud computing model that provides customers a complete cloud platform-hardware, software, and infrastructure-for developing, running, and managing applications without the cost, complexity, and inflexibility that often comes with building and maintaining that platform on-premises.

The PaaS provider hosts everything-servers, networks, storage, operating system software, databases, development tools-at their data centre. Typically, customers can pay a fixed fee to provide a specified amount of resources for a specified number of users, or they can choose 'pay-as-you-go' pricing to pay only for the resources they use. Either option enables PaaS customers to build, test, deploy run, update and scale applications more quickly and inexpensively they could if they had to build out and manage their own on-premises platform.

Every leading cloud service provider-including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure-has its own PaaS offering. Popular PaaS solutions are also available as open-source projects (e.g. Apache Stratos, Cloud Foundry) or from software vendors (e.g. Red Hat OpenShift and Salesforce Heroku).