What is PaaS, its Advantages, and How Does it Work?
PaaS, short for the platform as a service, is a term that refers to a cloud service through which the provider provides the customer with a development environment, as well as the necessary tools for the development of new applications.
Therefore, PaaS as a service is beneficial for developers and software companies who want to create and publish new programs or applications without personally dealing with the necessary infrastructure.
What is PaaS?
PaaS represents the link between software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in cloud computing. While IaaS only provides the infrastructure organizations need to do their jobs, PaaS goes one step further and offers a suite of tools to start developing applications right away.
Design, test, review and deploy the product to your users – everything is possible with a platform as a service.
After talking about infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), we continue with the glossary on Cloud Computing. Now we have to talk about the PaaS ( Platform as a Service ) that, when translated, we can name as platform as a Service, which is the intermediate layer of cloud architecture (as we can see in the image that illustrates this post).
Platforms as a Service (PaaS) allow us to produce software without thinking or rather, without being so aware of the necessary resources for it since we will have greater flexibility and a more straightforward and more adjusted (in costs) scalability, thanks to the Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS).
How is PaaS Structured?
PaaS offerings comprise basic infrastructures such as servers, operating systems, storage, and middleware, programs that connect various applications. Added to this are development tools, programming languages, database management systems, and container techniques.
The different solutions in the platform have been developed by the provider itself or by third parties. Its purpose is to allow customers to create new web applications without significant complications.
Therefore, if you use PaaS, you will not have to worry about acquiring and managing the infrastructure or obtaining the development solutions you require. Still, you can focus entirely on the programming of your application and your clients. The resulting programs can be made available as software as a service via the cloud.
These may be, for example, business applications or internal software intended solely for internal company use.
Advantages of PaaS Over Local Platforms
You are probably wondering the advantages of platforms as a service compared to traditional media hosted on a local machine.
On the one hand, as we have explained before, platforms as a service tend to work, in turn, on infrastructures as a service, which significantly simplifies the management and configuration of the resources necessary to make the platform work correctly and optimally.
This is because, on the one hand, there is no technical or resource limitation beyond the cost of the service itself. On the other hand, most cloud infrastructures today have prefabricated instances or systems that have all the necessary resources, drivers, and dependencies. And specific to operate various types of platforms.
And if none of them fit exactly what is needed, it is always possible to configure them to our exact needs and to be able to replicate them with a single click.
How Does PaaS Work?
With the platform as a service, you will develop your product as you would in your development environment. Once the code is created, it is transferred to the forum, deployed, and executed in a container that offers you the resources you need to see the changes immediately.
Many PaaS services are capable of running multiple versions of a program simultaneously, allowing you, for example, to create real-time test environments or rollbacks of previous versions.
Web hosting offers are a classic example of how a platform as a service works. You create the code and enter it into the hosting web service as a customer.
It runs the code and displays the web page you created. You don’t have to worry about disk space, maintenance, or database configuration. However, PaaS offerings can be much more complex and include more features.
