The Platform As A Service (PAAS) advantages for the Application Development

What is the PaaS?

The PaaS (Platform As A Service) is a cloud development environment through which the provider provides hardware, operating system, application platforms and the whole stack required for the development process: web server, database system management, support tools, development tools and other resources useful for the application development realization.

A PaaS solution is designed to support the whole application lifecycle: creation, test, distribution, management and update.

The PaaS model deletes the complexity costs linked to the software license, middleware and infrastructure of the beneath applications and other resources management.

As developers don’t have to deal with the infrastructure, environments and support services creation and maintenance anymore, they have the opportunity to focus on the development process, on the new code writing, on the engaging user interface design, on appropriate distributed application architectures, thanks also to a platform integrated functionality, as the workflow, security or research functionalities and so on.

The software and hardware purchase, configuration, optimization and management are in charge of the provider and the controlled environment based on known and reliable technologies helps the developers to get the creation and development processes faster. The application developers can get the tools autonomously, so they can implement application in an easier way.

Which are the PaaS advantages?

The immediate advantage you can gain by using the PaaS are:

1. Code writing time is reduced: the PaaS development tools reduce the code writing time spent for a new software development, thanks to the platform pre-coded integrated components;
2. Processes acceleration and automation;
3. Increase in the distribution productivity and rationalization;
4. More development capacity without increasing the number of employees. The platform components distributed as a service can provide your team with new abilities without searching for new skilled resources;
5. The use of sophisticated tools at lower price and based on the real needs;
6. Efficient applications lifecycle management. The PaaS model offers all the functionalities needed to support the whole application lifecycle inside the same integrated environment;
7. The IT workload is reduced, it means also the start-up and maintenance operations costs reduction

RedHat OpenShift

There are lots of PaaS solutions. In our opinion, one of the best is RedHat OpenShift, which is available in 2 options: public or private. In the first case, the application development, creation, implementation and hosting are in the cloud, in the second one it is possible to implement it as a private cloud or on-premise.

With OpenShift it is possible to implement distributed, advanced and scalable services based on Docker Containers, which combine the application with the dependent files, making the production and development environments uniform and simplifying the applications distribution.

 Every application written using OpenShift can be developed also outside this environment supporting the same languages, enabling developers to move easier, avoiding the vendor lock-in and allowing possible future migration to the development environment.

Conclusions:

To resume: nowadays the software and its development process represent the modern business core. There is a large number of tools and infrastructure, mostly opensource, that help companies to develop new software and services in a more efficient way, to integrate them with workflows and already existing business processes.

Companies have to develop and manage the technologic stack and at the same time take advantages from the market’s innovation, without being crushed by the difficulties deriving from the union of such a large quantity of tools. The Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise PaaS solution can be integrated with containers, container packing, orchestration, virtualization, continuous integration, cloud management and out-of-the-box frameworks languages.

The Platform as a Service solution provides companies with the cloud platform they need to deliver software services required by customers and by the internal organization.

In order to be competitive, companies have to be always reactive and able to work in team. It services create great expectations to the customers, so we have to adapt them quickly, leaving the traditional development approach and adopting a more open one, like the DevOps methodology. If you want to learn more about it download our FREE GUIDE: