Is PaaS a Public Cloud or a Private Cloud?
Platform-as-a-Service, or better yet PaaS is a cloud computing service where vendors supply a cloud-based platform enabling clients to develop, host, and run applications. It is amongst the three cloud computing service models. Is PaaS a Public Cloud or a Private Cloud, let’s explore all the possibilities.
As a PaaS client, you primarily rent all the resources needed to build applications from a cloud provider, including infrastructure, operating systems, and development tools. This service mainly simplifies the development of web applications for you as a developer because the backend management happens in the background.
What are the Three Cloud Computing Models?
Cloud computing has three core models: Platform as a service (developer tools and equipment maintained by the provider), Software-as-a-Service (hosted and maintained by the cloud provider), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (servers, storage, etc. Managed by your cloud provider).
Understand the difference between public clouds and private clouds
What is a Public Cloud?
Public cloud services are cloud computing solutions offered to multiple clients by a cloud provider. Public cloud services include software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Public cloud service runs on remote servers managed by the provider. You can access the services through the Internet.
What is a Private Cloud?
Private cloud services are cloud computing solutions exclusively serving a single business or organization. In this way, it’s easier to customize resources to accommodate specific organizational IT requirements.
The private cloud can get physically hosted as an on-site data center, or a third-party provider can manage the hosting. Either way, the services, and infrastructure get organized on a private network. All hardware and software remain dedicated to a single organization.
What Components Are Available In Platform as a Service?
Platform as Service offerings includes everything you need to build applications as a developer. The primary services offered by cloud platform solutions providers include:
Development Tools
Cloud platforms as Service providers offer multiple software development tools, including a source code editor, debugging tools, a compiler, and other crucial development tools. The tools are sometimes offered together as one development framework with specific tools varying between PaaS vendors.
Operating System
A Platform as a Service provider supplies and maintains the operating system you work on as you develop and run your applications.
Middleware
Middleware is crucial to run an application on PaaS Services, although you don’t interact with it.
Middleware is the software that plays middle-man between the user-interface applications and the operating system running your machine. For instance, middleware enables your software to respond to input instructions from the keyboard or mouse.
Databases
PaaS providers also supply developers with database management systems and maintenance.
Infrastructure
Everything included in infrastructure as a Service is in the platform as a Service application. The provider either manages storage, servers, and physical data centers or purchases them from IaaS providers.
Advantages of Platform as a Service Models
Quick Deployment and Marketing
PaaS enables you to build applications more rapidly than if you had to worry about structuring, configuring, and making provisions for your development platform and backend infrastructure.
Conveniently, all you need to do with PaaS is write the code you want to execute, test, and run your application, and your vendor sorts out the rest.
Productive Work Environment
PaaS permits you to host, develop, debug, test, and update your applications all in one environment. Thanks to PaaS, you can accurately determine whether your web application will function smoothly before actually deploying it. Or updates.
PaaS simplifies your application development lifecycle.
Effective Costs, Efficient Costs
PaaS is more cost-effective than IaaS services, especially since you don’t have to manage and maintain your virtual machines.
Some providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing, whereby you only pay for the usage of computing resources by the application. You avoid unnecessary costs. However, pricing varies between vendors, and some cloud providers may charge a flat fee per month.
Easy Licensing
PaaS cloud providers handle all licensing for operating systems, development tools, and everything else included in their platform.
Disadvantages of Using PaaS
Vendor Dependency
Too much effort and resources are required to change PaaS vendors, making a business highly dependent on its standing vendor. As a result, any changes in your providers’ processes or infrastructure can significantly impact the performance of your applications, especially if they run on the old configurations.
Also, any changes in pricing may suddenly increase the running costs of your application.
Vendor Lock-In
Building your application on a vendor’s platform, and using their tools may make it challenging to switch PaaS providers. Different vendors may have different architectures and structures. You may experience compatibility issues with languages, libraries, APIs, or even the operating system to develop and run your application.
Thus, developers may need to either rebuild or make excessive changes to your application.
Security and Compliance Issues
The architecture of PaaS enables external vendors to store the majority, or all of your application’s data, alongside hosting the code. Sometimes your vendor even uses a third party (IaaS) to keep the databases.
Although most PaaS vendors are established companies with strong security measures, such instances make it challenging to assess and test your application data security.
