You’ll find many Platform as a Service providers out there in a time when PaaS technology has more use than ever. If you’re new to what PaaS is, it’s important to learn about what it can do to help your development team work more efficiently and pare down your infrastructure expenditures.
No doubt you’ve felt the pain in the past (or do now) about having to spend so much in your budget just to gain competitive technology. This probably led to overspending on things like hardware and software to keep you one step ahead.
Thanks to the cloud, you no longer have to invest in physical hardware and software licenses. As part of a typical cloud computing stack, PaaS is at the top now to help you bring the above infrastructure in a new way.
It’s still essential to learn as much as possible about this technology so you make a more educated decision on whether it’s right for you. The same goes for how to best define what makes for a good provider.
A Clear Definition Platform as a Service Providers
The applications mentioned above are available entirely over the Internet with PaaS. Usually available in the cloud stack with SaaS and IaaS (Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service, respectively), PaaS has specific preference for application developers. Going through the cloud, developers have easier access to hardware and software without having to worry about maintenance, updates, and the automation required to deliver their software to end users.
PaaS is especially more useful for your entire IT team who had major responsibilities in installing and maintaining your infrastructure. While IaaS is the only service that replaces most of your infrastructure, PaaS is a good start when you’re working on a strict budget.
Your PaaS provider can give your developers key development tools like automated builds for popular programming languages, such as Node.JS, Go, Ruby, or Java and more automated hosting capability for your applications. For example, a PaaS provider will allow you to scale your application up and down with a few commands or clicks of the mouse, or easily use add-on services that provide hosted database services. This immediately removes your need to use your own servers and worrying about how they hold up during disasters or from security threats.
Helping Software Development
Using PaaS makes the lives of software developers much easier. Your team can change many features in their development environment at will without having to take time to manually update and create automation scripts and configuration management code. Plus, upgrading of the underlying operating system and components is essentially done with one click or handled for you altogether. Just imagine how much time this saves your developers and yourself in being able to focus on your application and product instead of all of the tooling built up around it that is required to deliver it to customers.
All of this is easily accessible through a web browser via a WebUI, via a command line interface or via an API from your provider. It’s through your provider where you’ll need to learn more, so you don’t assume every PaaS service is alike.
Properly Defining a Quality PaaS Provider
First, you need to see if a PaaS is a good fit for your company. If your developers need better tools for work efficiency and you can’t afford hardware and software updates this year, then that is likely the case.
Always look at your provider’s financial viability as well to see whether they’ll be around. With so much competition in this industry, they could easily go out of business, leaving you scrambling to quickly find a new provider.
