We are aware of immense benefit of using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and that is immense cost savings as one can rent the computing resources only when that are needed. In a similar way Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers two most incredible benefits and that are: Reduced costs Increased speed in development and deployment PaaS operates in a way which closely resembles the SaaS which means that you rent the service when you need it during development and deployments times rather than purchasing them. Moreover in a hybrid environment that same PaaS environment is used by the companies to provide services at the both public and private ends which offer immense levels of flexibility alongside agility. In a homogenous environment it is easy to move workload from private cloud environment to public cloud environment which offers easy deployment with efficient scaling. It also allows organizations to have higher level of control over particular application.
Organizational costs which include traditional application development, deployment model can be reduced heavily by using PaaS including other costs which are mentioned below:
Server and storage: Development which is writing and testing programs is a resource intensive task and requires high amount of server and storage space and once development and deployment is done this space remain unutilized but still require power, cooling and maintenance. As a result organizations often find themselves spending considerable amount of time and money in utilizing such spaces.
In PaaS environment development tools are provided by the PaaS which help organizations in saving large amount of money on servers and storage.
Network bandwidth: For a development and deployment process to put extra strain on the network bandwidth is not so uncommon In fact development teams perform the workload testing to see the behavior of the application under different circumstances. This often requires the allocation of extra network resources along with the extended bandwidth capacity. PaaS enables testing in the cloud environment rather than in the data center itself.
Software maintenance: Maintaining software updates and changes not only consume large amount of time but also put immense burden on the organization in terms of money. Although PaaS requires per-user, per-month charge, this cost is significantly less than the cost of software license and its maintenance fee itself. In PaaS platform vendor is responsible for managing the updates and patches.
Personnel: In order to keep everything running and up to date organizations must have dedicated staff in charge of storage, archiving, networks, security, help desk etc. But by adopting PaaS as a standardized platform the complex staff structure is reduced to simple service and support structure. This helps the organizations in refocusing the team’s dedication to essential tasks.
Fewer mistakes: During the time of application development and deployment the team faces immense pressure of getting things done quickly by the deadline and such pressure often leads to careless mistakes. PaaS reduces the possibility of such mistakes as the platform is already known to work fully and developers are no longer responsible for managing the middleware.
Skill requirement: Generally middleware is not standardized and is often complex as a result deploying the application successfully takes a lot of experience. This whole process is further complicated by the steep learning slope and continuous requirement to manage these components. By providing the middleware through PaaS low skill levels are required to deploy the applications which means need of assistance from specific expert is highly reduced.
In terms of improving the speed, flexibility and agility PaaS helps to do the following:
• Application reaches the market faster as developers only have to concentrate on the application development.
• Company becomes more competitive by spreading the capital investments.
• Enhanced ability to react to the changes as no large up-front costs are associated with the application development.
