Cloud technology landscape and the role of PaaS

Today, any business expects automation to be a cornerstone of success. Traditional approaches are too slow when it comes to delivering innovation at the pace at which the business ecosystem changes. This is one of the main reasons why many businesses are moving towards automation and DevOps.

If we take a look at evolving software delivery technologies, we can easily see that old-generation applications were installed first directly on bare metal, and then on virtual machines. And with time, these companies started using different IaaS cloud platforms. The reason is very obvious—the IaaS platform allows us to bring automation to the next level using cloud orchestration tools and exposed APIs. The way IaaS automation does this on an infrastructure level is that it simplifies virtual networking, storage, and virtual servers. To use IaaS platforms, we still need to install and configure applications and it is usually a time-consuming process. Imagine that there is a need to install and configure a PHP-based application from scratch each and every time you develop a new feature and test it. It takes a lot of time even with automation tools.

PaaS is the next generation of platforms to deliver applications in a quick and automated manner in production. With PaaS, the application delivering process looks very simple—there is no need to install and configure an application platform for web servers, databases, and so on. It is provided by the platform itself, OpenShift in our case. This means that you just need to upload your application code and database structures; the rest of it will be taken care of by PaaS:

The following diagram shows the difference between hosting applications on bare-metal, IaaS, and PaaS platforms: