DevOps Practices - Platform as a Service (PaaS)

DevOps Practices - Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a service designed for companies that want to eliminate the tasks of platform management, including the management of underlying infrastructure. Instead, companies can focus on their core business - building and managing their applications.

Tasks such as resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any similar tasks are eliminated, helping you become more productive and competitive.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. Available resources fit various needs, ranging from simple cloud-based apps to complex, cloud-enabled enterprise applications. A simple pay-as-you-go payment model allows the use of resources you need instead of over-provisioning resources that you don't use. Compared to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), PaaS also includes infrastructure - servers, networking, and storage, but also the middleware such as database management system, various development, and other tools. PaaS supports the whole web application lifecycle from building, testing, deploying to managements, and updates.

PaaS also helps avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing software licenses and managing underlying application infrastructure, middleware, container orchestrators, and various development tools.

Companies manage their applications and services, while the cloud service provider does the heavy lifting of various infrastructure and middleware management tasks.

What Are the Common Use-cases for Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

Companies use PaaS in various scenarios.

• Analytics or business intelligence - tools and services provided within PaaS allow companies to analyze and mine their data, helping them find insights, patterns, and predicting outcomes to improve products, forecasting, design decisions, investment returns, and other business decisions.
• Development framework - PaaS provides an excellent framework that developers can use to build upon to develop or customize cloud-based applications. PaaS lets developers create applications by using built-in software components. Valuable cloud features such as scalability, multi-tenant capability, and high-availability are included by default, reducing the amount of manual work for developers.
• Additional services - PaaS providers also offer other services that help enrich applications, such as workflow, directory, security, and scheduling.

What Are the Benefits of Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

PaaS offers the same advantages as IaaS with added middleware layer with additional features on top of the infrastructure.

Speed

PaaS development tools help you cut the time needed to develop new applications by giving you access to services built into the platform, such as workflow, directory services, security features, search, and so on.

Added Development Capabilities

Components within PaaS give your team new capabilities without needing to hire more staff or spend time developing.

Simple Payment Model

The simple pay-as-you-go model allows you to use advanced software development, business intelligence, and analytics tools built into the platform at a fraction of the costs needed to buy similar solutions.

Efficient Application Lifecycle Management

PaaS provides all of the capabilities that your company needs to support the complete web application lifecycle, from building, testing, deploying, to management and updates, all within the same integrated environment.

PaaS Tools on AWS

Run and Manage Web Apps - AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service designed to deploy and scale web applications and services developed with languages such as Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Nginx, Apache, Passenger, and IIS.

You simply upload your code to AWS, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles all deployment tasks: capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and health monitoring. At the same time, you can access the underlying resources at any time because you have full control over the AWS resources powering your application.

Elastic Beanstalk is a free service - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications.

Conclusion

Platform as a Service helps companies eliminate the infrastructure and middleware management tasks needed to run their applications. Also, the platform allows access to prebuilt components that developers can use as a part of the platform. Service is charged with a pay-as-you-go model where you only pay for the resources and services that you actually use, helping you cut down the cost of your platform and infrastructure management.

Sedmi odjel is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and Solution Provider specializing in the implementation of AWS solutions and services.

As a company that works with a lot of software companies, we understand the whole development lifecycle and how DevOps model and tools can help your company become more productive and competitive.

If you have any question about DevOps tools:

• visit our dedicated DevOps page
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com

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