PaaS

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a framework and tools for developers to build, deploy, and manage applications without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. A PaaS provider delivers a complete development and deployment environment: runtime environments, middleware, servers, storage, networking, development tools, database management, and often integrated services such as caching, messaging, analytics, and authentication. Users focus on application code and data; the provider handles provisioning, patching, scaling, load balancing, and backups.

PaaS platforms typically offer multi-tenant or isolated environments, automatic scaling, deployment automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and built-in monitoring. They may support multiple programming languages and frameworks and provide integrated databases, queueing, and API management. Common example platforms include Heroku, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure App Service, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and IBM Cloud Foundry.

Use cases include web and mobile backends, API services, and microservices architectures, particularly when development velocity and scalability are priorities. Advantages include reduced time-to-market, streamlined operations, predictable cost, and the ability to outsource infrastructure management. Disadvantages include reduced control over the underlying stack, potential vendor lock-in, performance variability due to multi-tenancy, and data portability concerns.

PaaS sits between IaaS (infrastructure as a service), which exposes more control over hardware and OS, and SaaS (software as a service), which delivers complete applications. Trends include container-based PaaS, Kubernetes offerings, serverless components, hybrid/multi-cloud deployments, and emphasis on security, compliance, and portability.