With evolution the concept of cloud computing is getting popular and is adding new spectrum to storage technologies or computing technologies.
But more recently the need of data, functionality and hardware as services depict the need of a platform that that can fully deploy these services within the cloud. Defining the term in a broad manner, a complete platform is needed in clouds including all systems and surroundings for end-to-end life cycle for developing, testing and finally deploying the web applications and the concept is named as “Platform-as-a-Service.”
Elaborating it more, PaaS is much larger compared to SaaS that encircles the end-to-end deployment of hosting platforms as services over Web. The concept will be more understood by the underlying six major offerings included in the term:
1) Offering common platform for the complete life cycle of a product: The concept aims for totally eliminating the need to develop at one place, test at other, and deployment at some other place. It stresses on developing, testing and then deploying at one single integrated environment.
PaaS reduces the cost of a project considerably by eliminating the costs required for building, configuring and maintaining the different environments; as it focuses on to realize a single platform/ computing environment for the entire software lifecycle. In crux, a complete Platform-as-a-Service facilitates offering source code control, application testing, staging, rollout and roll-back, in a user friendly and single environment.
2) Rich User Experience: PaaS is focused to deliver rich user experience with interactivity to consumers. It should provide a platform that needs no input in form of plug ins or downloads from user side; that it should be efficient enough to deliver the best user experience available on the web, compared against conventional approaches.
3) Scalability, Reliability, and Security: Scalability, reliability, and security are must to be built in PaaS thus eliminating the need to require any additional development, configuration costs.
4) Integrated Services and database requirements: As a complete platform offering, PaaS should be able to offer integrated web services and database environments. The platform should offer connectivity to glue the sources, needed applications for software investments in databases, and web services.
5) Offer Collaboration Support: As project development needs collaborated efforts from a team, so PaaS should have built in support for both formal and on-demand collaboration throughout the entire software lifecycle.
6) Intensive Application Instrumentation: PaaS should offer complete instrumentation of application thereby helping developers to understand their applications and make improvements. This help organization to analyze how users are using the application, performance quo they are receiving, or any application crashes.
So, after such a long elaborated definition one thing can be said for sure that the concept makes everything moving to clouds, reinventing the traditional approaches like spicing up the concept of mash ups and many more utilities used nowadays. It taps the user potential to leverage all services at one point of reach and makes everything Web enabled thus making it easier for future collaborations with partners, or customers.
More precisely, the terminology is an extension to what clouds can have more. You can either use clouds by Cloud Computing or by SaaS or via PaaS. PaaS offers the following utilities over the former two:
A) Much faster custom applications needed for the environment
B) Integrations to offer access SaaS applications and services, and a way to get connected back to existing traditional applications.
The most practical example for the implementation of this concept is Salesforce.com. Salesforce offers SaaS but also offers complete platform to consumers to write their applications. More precisely, Salesforce offers platform for every application that you want to build, You just have to post your code to the infrastructure offered by Salesforce.
The terminology is the latest buzz as Google is going the same way. It is in rumors that Google App Engine is also coming its way.
At better it can be said that “This is the next big thing.”