What is Platform as a Service (PaaS) Cloud Computing?

Platform as a service (PaaS) automates the configuration, deployment and ongoing management of applications in the cloud.

By automating such important but resource-consuming tasks, companies are able to accelerate innovation and agility while saving money.

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learn more about PaaS

Which PaaS is best for your business?

At first glance, it might look like many PaaS options can meet your needs. A closer look reveals that only a few are true commercial-grade solutions and that significant philosophical and architectural differences exist between them.

Here are some important criteria to keep in mind:

Open and non-proprietary, with no lock-in
Meets existing reliability, performance and scalability requirements
Provides transparency and configurability
Backed by an organization with deep technical expertise and elite support

You should also ask prospective vendors the following questions:

What technologies does your PaaS support?
What stage of development is your PaaS in? Production, beta or pre-beta?
What does your support model look like?
What level of scalability, high availability and security do you provide?
Will your PaaS allow me to quickly and easily extract my data and run my application elsewhere?

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Other cloud computing models

Besides PaaS, there are two other primary cloud computing models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

The cloud provider manages and delivers the underlying infrastructure, including storage, network and computing resources.
You are able to deploy, run and control software, which may include operating systems, applications with possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g. firewalls).

Platform as a Service (PaaS):

The cloud provider manages and delivers programming languages, frameworks, libraries, services and tools for you to create and deploy applications.
The service provider also manages and controls the infrastructure, including network, servers, operating systems and storage.
You have control over the deployed applications and configuration settings for the application hosting environment.

Software as a Service (SaaS):

The cloud provider manages and controls the underlying cloud infrastructure, operating systems, application platform and even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific configuration.
You have the ability to use the vendor's applications running on a cloud infrastructure.
The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a web browser or an application programming interface (API).