PaaS is a slightly abstracted environment for developing and deploying cloud-based applications. In a PaaS model, the cloud service provider will provide all things IaaS plus operating systems, middleware, and development or runtime tools that are necessary.
PaaS can be valuable to developers within an organization since the platform can provide services such as database management, development tools, scheduling, load balancing, and business analytics. Depending on the type of PaaS being used, developers may not need to be familiar with scaling or redundancy and availability concepts, as they might be managed by the service provider.
You can see in the following diagram how PaaS provides a superset of features to IaaS. PaaS offerings include everything from IaaS, and then typically add operating system management and automation, deployment, and development tools. The following diagram illustrates the features of PaaS:
The application development life cycle includes stages of building, testing, and deploying. PaaS enables developers to shorten their release cycles by utilizing tools that have already been made available on the platform.
Some popular use cases for PaaS include the following:
- Multi platform testing
- Analytics
- Sophisticated development tools
- Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to support rapid build and deployment
Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kubernetes-service/), Azure Cognitive Search (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/search/), Content Delivery Network (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cdn/), and App Service (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/) are examples of some of Microsoft's PaaS offerings.
While IaaS and PaaS offer a lot of functionality, there are also scenarios where it doesn't make business sense to deploy and maintain infrastructure and applications. SaaS, another type of service, solves that problem by providing ready-to-use environments and services that organizations can start using immediately, with little or no configuration. Let's discuss SaaS.