What is Platform as a services?

Platform as a services (Paas) is a computing platform that allows developer to develop or customize applications upon its framework. PaaS can be defined as a cloud-based solution that eliminates the complexity of buying and maintaining the infrastructure underneath website or software. As a Cloud platform service, PaaS is an advanced solution, which is upgraded from traditional open source platform, that helps to develop, test, and deploy webs and applications quickly with less difficulty and more cost-effectiveness. By using the technology, enterprise operations or a third-party vendors can manage operational systems, virtualization, storage, network, and the PaaS software totally in-house.

There is a hybrid model to deliver enterprise Paas which uses both public IaaS and on-premise infrastructure or as a pure private PaaS, the end used services. PaaS allows developers to create applications by using middleware, software components that are built into the PaaS, it is similarity with how to create macros in Excel. Applications that is built on PaaS receive cloud advantages such as scalability, high-availability, multiple licensing tenancy, SaaS activation and more. Therefore, Enterprises benefit from PaaS because it reduces tasks in coding necessary, automates business policy, and helps to migrate applications to hybrid model.

PaaS is similar to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in some elements, however it is differentiated from IaaS by the value added services. The first sort of PaaS is an optimal platform for software and applications development to collaborate, which focuses on workflow management without the regards of the data source that is used for the applications. The second approach is to allow the creation of software manipulating proprietary data from an application. This is a method to create applications with a common form or type of data of PaaS.

PaaS is perfectly suitable for multiple developers who are working on the same development projects or where other external organizations need to follow and interact with projects during the working process. In addition, it brings uncountable value for organizations who already have an existing data source and want to create applications which leverage that data. For example, a company has sales information from a customer relationship management tool (CRM) and need another tool to qualify the data into criteria such as leads, opportunities, closed deals or lost deals... Finally,

PaaS is useful where developers have desire to test and deploy services in-house. In recent years, software development becomes more agile and this trend encourages the utilization of PaaS to increase productivity and customization. Most of big brands in technology spend a lot of effort to take the lead in Cloud computing and PaaS is one of their core projects, for instance, Google has Google App Engine, Microsoft has Azure Services, Magento E-Commerce has Enterprises Cloud Edition and SalesForce has Force.com platform.

However, there are some specific situations that PaaS may not be the best solution. Firstly, PaaS seems to be inappropriate when the application needs high mobility in terms of hosting location. In another case, the proprietary languages would make impacts on the projects if PaaS is used. Customized hardware also probably cause problems if the owners try to use PaaS.