Platform as a Service

While AWS doesn't provide a full-blown PaaS offering such as Cloud Foundry (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/) at the moment, it has a number of products that can simplify the product development experience. Its broad service catalog can also be used to compose a DIY platform. PaaS is described as the delivery of a computing platform, typically an operating system, programming language execution environment, database, or web server. With AWS, a user can easily turn a code base into a running environment without having to worry about any of the pieces underneath, such as setting up and maintaining the database, web server, or code runtime versions. It also allows your product to be scaled without having to do anything other than set policies through the configuration. We'll survey the services for on-demand expansion in Chapter 3, Availability Patterns - Understanding Your Needs.