Platform as a service — or PaaS — is a “cloud computing” model for running applications without the hassle of maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure at a company. Cloud computing has dramatically changed how business applications are built and run because they are hosted on the Internet. Enterprises of all sizes have adopted PaaS solutions like Salesforce.com for simplicity, scalability, and reliability. PaaS applications always have the latest features without constantly upgrading.
As Network World explains, “PaaS is somewhere in between IaaS and SaaS,” infrastructure as a service and software as a service. “It's not a finished product, like SaaS, and it's not a tabula rasa, like IaaS. PaaS gives your application developers hooks and tools to develop to that particular platform. For example, Microsoft's Windows Azure gives you tools to develop mobile apps, social apps, websites, games and more. You build these things, but you use the APIs and tools to hook them into the Azure environment and run them there.”
Building and running on-premise applications has always been complex, expensive, and slow. Each application required hardware, an operating system, a database, middleware, Web servers, and other software. Once the stack was assembled, a team of developers had to navigate frameworks like J2EE and .NET. A team of network, database, and system management experts was needed to keep everything up and running. Inevitably, a business would require a change to the application, which would then kick off another lengthy development, test, and redeployment cycle.
Today, technical innovation is driven by mobile and cloud computing. This innovation is feeding a worldwide industry that meets the demand for billions of mobile devices and the computing cloud that supports them. Innovation in size, power requirements, memory, battery life, and flexibility are the answer to the world’s thirst for small mobile devices that can do everything the desktop and laptop used to do, and even more. Add the huge increase in bandwidth now available via Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks that is driving innovation in servers to enable the cloud.
Servers that enable the cloud must keep pace with the demands of billions of smart-device transactions in the hands of billions of consumers worldwide. In December 2011, IHS iSuppli had this to say about cloud computing:
“The cloud computing market is heading into the stratosphere as companies seek to offer services designed to serve tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. …projected to surge to $110 billion in 2015, up from $23 billion in 2010.” So wrote Ross Nelson in Electronic Products in March 2012.
Additionally, large companies often needed specialized facilities to house their data centers and a team to maintain them. Enormous amounts of electricity also were needed to power the servers as well as the systems to keep them cool. Finally, a failover site was needed to mirror the data center so information could be replicated in case of a disaster.
Applications built with this complexity and infrastructure are difficult to scale for usage spike demands, brittle to update as the business needs change, and are difficult to make mobile and social.
Just as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, iTunes, and YouTube made it possible to access new capabilities and new markets through a web browser, PaaS offers a faster, more cost-effective model for application development and delivery. PaaS provides all the infrastructure needed to develop and run applications over the Internet. Users can access custom apps built in the cloud, and not have to go on an Easter egg hunt to find appropriate resources for a task at hand.
Sources:
http://www.salesforce.com/paas/overview/
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