PLATFORM AS A SERVICE

The last two blogs focused on the basics of Cloud Computing and one of its platforms – Infrastructure as a Service. Now, let's see about the other foundation that most of the cloud computing services lay out to the people – Platform as a Service.

Due to the recent technological advancements, most people rely on high-performance compute power to drive their workflow. Also, the recently founded startups and other small businesses will not have access to all the necessary hardware for processing their workflow. This also includes the costs incurred for Operating Systems and other foundation layers which require licenses to be purchased to function effectively.

This is where PaaS comes in. The Cloud Computing service providers will have pre-configured base images and compute instances that can be used to fire up and use a PC in the internet layer. The service typically includes Virtualized CPU Cores along with a set amount of RAM, Storage, and Network Interface. Additionally, they bundle a license to a server version or a full-blown desktop version of the operating system of your choice and provide you with a ready-to-go desktop which you can then use to process your workload.

Image Source: Vecteezy

Why is this interesting? When you look at the benefits it offers for everyone, you will be less impressed and would rather end up building your own PC by yourself. But, the actual setup costs along with the overhead incurred for running the hardware from our end itself far exceed the simplicity and the ease of use in Cloud Computing.

Further, PaaS solutions (in certain regions and offerings) also include a database for managing the flow of data along with all the developer tools. This helps even the developers who often rely on specialized services to take up Cloud Computing.

Depending on the vendors, you will also get monitoring stats and metrics. This assists us in keeping an eye on how much resources are being used by the development environment and helps us in deciding if we need to scale up our instance’s horsepower.


Photo by Juanjo Jaramillo on Unsplash

Most of the complex workloads such as setting up the Middleware for the end-user to access the application with and other input sources to capture the data will be pre-configured with select vendors. So, people who are working on developing software can focus on the core part without looking for re-doing the basics every time.

One of the biggest advantages of using a PaaS is the ability to create and deploy applications frequently without doing the heavy lifting required to complete the initial set-up and maintain the environment in which they will run.

Downsides:

Now looking at some of its limitations, most of the developers who use one platform to build and deploy their apps won’t be able to switch their vendors since most of the basic framework used in developing the application or software was from the toolset provided by the vendor.

Also, some of the vendors may use another third party to host the database services through IaaS architecture. Hence, it will become difficult for us to understand and test the end-to-end security of the instance as a whole.

References:

https://www.cloudflare.com/resource-hub/ 

https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/cloud