A shift in how we build applications

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings make it simple and easy for software developers to deploy applications, APIs, mobile backends, etc. by eliminating infrastructure concerns from their purview. A fully managed PaaS solution allows developers to completely avoid touching a network stack. That’s a huge advantage for enterprises feeling pressure to get their products out the door quickly.

What came before?

At one point in time, deploying any application meant provisioning physical servers (or, later, virtual machines) with manual configurations specifying the correct runtimes and dependencies for each application to run reliably.

Before the advent of PaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offered a notable improvement in deployment flexibility, but it lacked the capacity to save development teams from building and managing the full deployment stack.

PaaS eliminated that gap entirely. It abstracted the infrastructure away completely, introducing the convenience of managed hosting at enterprise scale.

What are fully managed PaaS offerings?

We can think of fully managed PaaS solutions as the plumbing developers need to run their production workloads. In that analogy, the PaaS provider implements the infrastructure and cleans the pipes, leaving the developer with nothing to do beyond using and managing the visible elements of the system.

With PaaS deployments, there’s no configuring virtual machines or applying patches to operating systems. There’s no babysitting scaling rules, either; developers simply write their code, deploy it, and the platform handles the rest.

It takes a lot of resources to provide a solution this robust, and that’s why platforms like Azure App Service, Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Heroku are the major players in today’s market. Each of their respective providers has the bandwidth to create prebuilt environments for myriad programming languages and enable customers to launch software applications in minutes. Even built-in logging and CI/CD hooks are baked into these offerings.

Why PaaS offerings are useful for enterprises

Simply put: PaaS platforms give enterprises the operational efficiency they need to compete with established competitors.

The most prominent advantage of PaaS platforms is their capacity to accelerate development without compromising control. Development teams can spend their time building and delivering application features, while information technology (IT) teams can maintain infrastructure visibility through built-in controls for monitoring, logging, security, etc.

On top of that, auto-scaling is another major benefit. Development and deployment teams no longer require complex deployment architecture to meet rapid shifts in traffic – the platform will automatically increase capacity to meet spikes in demand, and built-in failovers will prevent widespread outages when servers go down.

Final thoughts: why this deployment model matters

It’s not just about saving time with fast deployment solutions – it’s about unlocking an entirely new model of application development. This model is all about reliability and reduced complexity, and it’s being embraced by enterprises all over the world.

As these cloud-native tools continue to mature, we’re seeing an increasingly broad range of services utilize the PaaS model. That includes backends for mobile apps and artificial intelligence (AI) powered threat detection platforms, too.

To learn about Cloudmersive Private Cloud deployments on Azure App Service, check out our blog or feel free to contact a member of our team.