Published: 10 September 2024
Contributors: Stephanie Susnjara, Ian Smalley
Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a complete on-demand cloud platform—hardware, software and infrastructure—for developing, running and managing applications.
It does so without the cost, complexity and inflexibility that often comes with building and maintaining platform on premises.
The PaaS provider hosts everything—servers, networks, storage, operating system software, databases and development tools—at their data center. Typically, customers can pay a fixed fee to provide a specified amount of resources for a specified number of users, or they can choose "pay-as-you-go" pricing to pay only for the resources they use.
Either option enables PaaS customers to build, test, deploy, run, update and scale applications more quickly and inexpensively than if they had had to build out and manage their own on-premises platform.
According to a report from Statista, in 2024, the PaaS global market is estimated to be worth over 176 billion US dollars. The study contributes this growth to the value PaaS brings by simplifying infrastructure management for software application development.1 Additionally, as the generative AI market accelerates, PaaS is also proving to be instrumental in its development and deployment.
Every leading cloud service provider—including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud® and Microsoft Azure—has its own PaaS offering. Popular PaaS solutions are also available as open source projects (for example, Apache Stratos, Cloud Foundry) or from software vendors (for example, Red Hat OpenShift and Salesforce Heroku).
Check out this lightboard video, "PaaS Explained," to further understand how PaaS works.
The most commonly cited benefits of PaaS, compared to an on-premises platform, include the following:
- Faster time to market
- Affordable access to a wider variety of resources
- More freedom to experiment, with less risk
- Easy, cost-effective scalability
- Greater flexibility for development teams
- Lower overall costs
- Enhanced security
With PaaS, there's no need to purchase and install the hardware and software you use to build and maintain your business application development platform (and no need for development teams to wait while you do it). You simply tap into the cloud service provider's PaaS to begin provisioning resources and developing immediately.
PaaS platforms typically offer access to a wider range of choices up and down the application stack—including operating systems, middleware, databases and development tools—than most organizations can practically or affordably maintain themselves.
PaaS also lets you try or test new operating systems, languages and other tools without making substantial investments in them or the IT infrastructure required to run them.
With an on-premises platform, scaling is always expensive, often wasteful and sometimes inadequate. You must purchase more compute, storage and networking capacity in anticipation of traffic spikes. Much of that capacity sits idle during low-traffic periods, and none of it can be increased in time to accommodate unanticipated surges. With PaaS, you can purchase more capacity and use it immediately whenever you need it.
PaaS services provide a shared software development environment that allows development and operations teams access to all the tools they need, from any location with an internet connection.
PaaS reduces costs by enabling organizations to avoid capital equipment expenses associated with building and scaling an application platform. PaaS can also reduce or eliminate software licensing costs. And by handling patches, updates and other administrative tasks, PaaS can reduce your overall application management costs.
PaaS providers invest heavily in security technologies, including built-in tools like threat modeling and access control, which can help organizations enhance their overall security approach.
In general, PaaS solutions have three main components:
- Cloud infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMs), operating system software, storage, networking and cloud security features, such as encryption and firewalls.
- Software for building, deploying and managing applications.
- Graphic user interface (GUI) where development or DevOps teams can do all their work throughout the entire application lifecycle.
Because PaaS delivers all standard development tools through the GUI online interface, developers can log in from anywhere to collaborate on projects, test new applications or roll out completed products. Applications are designed and developed right in the PaaS using middleware. With streamlined workflows, multiple development and operations teams can work on the same project simultaneously.
PaaS providers manage the bulk of your cloud computing services, such as servers, runtime and virtualization. As a PaaS customer, your company maintains management of applications and data.
The most commonly cited benefits of PaaS, compared to an on-premises platform, include:
- Faster time to market. With PaaS, there’s no need to purchase and install the hardware and software you use to build and maintain your application development platform—and no need for development teams to wait while you do it. You simply tap into the cloud service provider’s PaaS to begin provisioning resources and developing immediately.
- Affordable access to a wider variety of resources. PaaS platforms typically offer access to a wider range of choices up and down the application stack—including operating systems, middleware, databases and development tools—than most organizations can practically or affordably maintain themselves.
- More freedom to experiment, with less risk. PaaS also lets you try or test new operating systems, languages and other tools without having to make substantial investments in them or in the infrastructure required to run them.
- Easy, cost-effective scalability. With an on-premises platform, scaling is always expensive, often wasteful and sometimes inadequate: You must purchase more compute, storage and networking capacity in anticipation of traffic spikes. Much of that capacity sits idle during low-traffic periods, and none of it can be increased in time to accommodate unanticipated surges. With PaaS, you can purchase more capacity and use it immediately, whenever you need it.
- Greater flexibility for development teams. PaaS services provide a shared software development environment that allows development and operations teams access to all the tools they need, from any location with an internet connection.
- Lower costs overall. Clearly, PaaS reduces costs by enabling an organization to avoid capital equipment expense associated with building and scaling an application platform. But PaaS can also reduce or eliminate software licensing costs. And by handling patches, updates and other administrative tasks, PaaS can reduce your overall application management costs.
Platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are the three most common cloud computing service models. In fact, it's common for an organization to use all three—even if they don't purchase all three specifically.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is internet access to "raw" IT infrastructure—physical servers, virtual machines, storage, networking and firewalls—hosted by a cloud provider. IaaS eliminates the cost and work of owning, managing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure. With IaaS, the organization provides its own application platform and applications.
Any PaaS offering necessarily includes the IaaS resources required to host it, even if those resources aren't discretely broken out or referred to as IaaS.
Software as a service (SaaS) is application software hosted on the cloud and used over an internet connection through a web browser, mobile app or thin client. SaaS enables your organization to use an application without the expense of setting up the infrastructure to run it and the effort and personnel to maintain it (for example, apply bug fixes and updates, address outages and more.) Salesforce and Slack are examples of popular SaaS offerings. Most web applications are considered SaaS.
Every SaaS offering includes the IaaS resources required to host it and, at minimum, the PaaS components needed to run it. Some SaaS vendors also provide a discrete PaaS that allows third parties to customize the SaaS offering.
PaaS, IaaS and SaaS are integral to today's multicloud environments—the use of cloud services from more than one cloud vendor. Multicloud gives organizations the flexibility to optimize performance, control cost and avoid vendor lock-in. In the enterprise, multicloud typically refers to running enterprise applications on PaaS or IaaS from multiple cloud service providers.
PaaS provides an integrated and ready-to-use platform and enables organizations to offload infrastructure management to the cloud provider. This allows development teams to focus on building, deploying and managing applications. PaaS can ease or advance several IT initiatives:
- Application development and delivery: PaaS streamlines app development and delivery by providing a custom application framework that automatically manages operating systems, software upgrades, storage and supporting infrastructure in the cloud.
- API development and management: Because of its built-in frameworks, PaaS makes it much simpler for teams to develop, run, manage and secure application programming interfaces(APIs) for sharing data and functions between applications.
- Internet of Things (IoT): Out of the box, PaaS can support a range of programming languages (for example, Java, Python, Swift and more), tools, and application environments used for Internet of Things (IoT) application development and real-time processing of data generated by IoT devices.
- Agile development and DevOps: PaaS can provide fully configured environments for the automation of the software application lifecycle, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), security, testing and deployment.
- Cloud migration and cloud-native development: With its ready-to-use tools and integration capabilities, PaaS can simplify the migration of existing applications to the cloud. Specifically, PaaS supports cloud migration via replatforming (moving an application to the cloud with modifications that take better advantage of cloud scalability, load balancing and other capabilities). PaaS also supports refactoring (rearchitecting some or all of an application by using cloud-native technologies; for example, microservices, containers, Kubernetes and serverless).
- Hybrid cloud strategy: Hybrid cloud integrates public cloud services, private cloud services and on-premises infrastructure and provides orchestration, management and application portability across all three. The result is a unified and flexible distributed computing environment, where an organization can run and scale its traditional (legacy) or cloud-native workloads on the most appropriate computing model. The right PaaS solution allows developers to build once, then deploy and manage anywhere in a hybrid cloud environment.
- Enterprise AI models: Enterprise-grade AI, including generative AI, requires a highly sustainable, compute- and data-intensive distributed infrastructure. PaaS provides such an environment to support and streamline the development and deployment of AI applications.
Many cloud, software and hardware vendors offer purpose-built PaaS solutions for building specific types of applications, or applications that interact with specific types of hardware, software or devices.
AIPaaS lets development teams build artificial intelligence (AI) applications without the often prohibitive expense of purchasing, managing and maintaining the significant computing power, storage capabilities and networking capacity these applications require. AIPaaS typically includes pretrained machine learning (ML) and deep learning models developers can use as-is or customize. It also includes ready-made APIs for integrating specific AI capabilities, such as speech recognition or speech-to-text conversion, into existing or new applications.
iPaaS is a cloud-hosted solution for integrating applications. iPaaS provides organizations with a standardized way to connect data, processes and services across different IT environments without purchasing, installing and managing their own backend integration hardware, middleware and software. (Note that PaaS solutions often include some degree of integration capability—API management, for example—but iPaaS is more comprehensive.)
cPaaS is a PaaS solution that lets developers easily add voice (inbound and outbound calls), video (including teleconferencing) and messaging (text and social media) capabilities to applications, without investing in specialized communications hardware and software.
mPaaS is a type of PaaS that simplifies application development and delivery for mobile devices. mPaaS typically provides low-code (even simple drag-and-drop) methods for accessing device-specific features, including the phone's camera, microphone, motion sensor and geolocation (or GPS) capabilities. This end-to-end solution helps streamline mobile app development into one integrated platform.
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Understand and compare the three most popular cloud computing service models.
Cloud computing lets you "plug into" infrastructure via the internet and use computing resources without installing and maintaining them on premises.
API management is the scalable process of creating, publishing and managing application programming interface (API) connections—sharing them, controlling access, tracking their usage and enforcing security policies—within an enterprise and multicloud setting.
Microservices, or microservices architecture, is a cloud-native architectural approach in which a single application is composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components or services.
Hybrid cloud combines and unifies public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure to create a single, flexible, cost-optimal IT infrastructure.
Footnotes
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1 Public cloud platform as a service (PaaS) user spending worldwide from 2015 to 2024, Statista, Mar 27, 2024