First up, I guess we’ll need to define Platform as a Service. I would describe PaaS environments as cloud computing services platforms that allow developers to launch and manage their web applications without having to confront the complexity of infrastructure creation and maintenance.
Or, in different words: PaaS platforms help you focus on code, not management, so you can build apps without worrying about IT tasks or waiting days to get servers ready for writing code.
To illustrate how this works in the real world, I’ll list and describe what I consider to be the top five PaaS providers currently on the market, along with their unique strengths.
Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that lets you build and run applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs change. With App Engine, there are no servers for you to maintain. You simply upload your application and it’s ready to go.
Further reading: 5 Reasons Why Google Compute Engine Will be the next Cloud Choice
Heroku provides abstract computing environments called dynos. These environments come in two flavors: web dynos (which respond to HTTP requests) and worker dynos (built to respond to task requests).
Heroku works best with applications built using the Twelve Factor App methodology. Third party applications are also available as services within the Heroku platform.
Features
Further reading: What is Heroku?
AppFog is a multi-language, multi-framework PaaS that’s a good option for creating multiple private clouds. It supports Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node, Scala, and Erlang and offers MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and RabbitMQ along with third-party add-ons. AppFog is based on the open source Cloud Foundry platform and supports Git, SVN, and Mercurial for code management.
Azure is sort of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and sort of PaaS, so an argument could be made that it doesn’t really belong on this list. However Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both IaaS and PaaS. This powerful combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and manage applications any way you like for unmatched productivity.
Azure supports any operating system, language, tool, and framework— from Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, C# to Java. It puts the best of Windows and Linux ecosystems at your fingertips, so you can build great applications and services that work with every device.
Further reading: Microsoft Azure App Service, Cloud Services, or VMs?
Red Hat OpenShift is based on open source applications and offers a wide variety of languages, databases, and components. The PaaS is highly customizable and offered in three forms:
OpenShift automates system administration tasks such as virtual server provisioning, configuration, and scaling and supports git repositories for code management.
OpenShift Online
OpenShift Enterprise
An on-premise, private Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that allows you to deliver apps faster and meet your enterprise’s growing application demands. With Red Hat’s award-winning private Platform as a Service, OpenShift Enterprise, you can improve developer productivity, increase operational efficiency, and expand your hardware utilization.
OpenShift Origin
I just don’t feel right to write an article about Cloud Computing without any mention of AWS. Like Azure, it can probably be classified as both IaaS and PaaS. But since Amazon’s family of services extends so far beyond PaaS, I chose to leave it out of this list.
Other services that I can recommend for you would include Engine Yard and Caspio.
Engine Yard runs its platform on AWS, so its PaaS-value rests more with orchestration and management than with providing software components.
Caspio is a little different from the other PaaS providers in that it does not offer a fully functional software development environment, but rather focuses on bringing desktop database-like functionality to the cloud. Caspio is designed for creating basic databases, providing data entry forms and report generation.
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