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Platform as a Service (PaaS)
PaaS solutions are development platforms for which
the development tool itself is hosted in the cloud and
accessed through a browser. With PaaS, developers can
build web applications without installing any tools on
their computer and then deploy those applications
without any specialized systems administration skills.
What
Makes PaaS Different?
The alternative to PaaS is to develop web applications
using desktop development tools like Eclipse or
Microsoft Access, then manually deploy those
applications to a cloud hosting provider such as Amazon
EC2.PaaS platforms also have functional differences
from traditional development platforms. These include:
- Multi-tenant
development tool: traditional development
tools are single user - a cloud-based studio must
support multiple users, each with multiple active
projects.
- Multi-tenant
deployment architecture: scalability is often
not a concern of the initial development effort and
is left instead for the system administrators to
deal with when the project deploys. In PaaS,
scalability of the application and data tiers must
be built-in (e.g., load balancing, failover need to
be basic elements of the dev platform itself).
- Integrated
management: traditional development solution
usually do not concern themselves with runtime
monitoring , but in PaaS, the monitoring ability
needs to be baked into the development platform.
- Integrated
billing: PaaS offerings require mechanisms
for billing based on usage that are unique to the
SaaS world.
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