Tip of the Day: What is this PaaS thing I keep hearing about?

Today’s (Cloud) Tip…PaaS

PaaS offers hosted application servers that have near-infinite scalability resulting from the large resource pools they rely on. PaaS also offers necessary supporting services like storage, security, integration infrastructure and development tools for a complete platform.

A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. Developers build applications and annotate the applications with resource descriptors. Upon deployment, the provisioning engine binds the necessary infrastructure capabilities declared in the descriptors to the application. The resources may include network endpoints, load balancers, CPU cores, memory and software dependencies. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. PaaS is generally suitable for brand-new applications, as legacy applications often require extensive refactoring to comply with sandbox rules.

Our PaaS offering is Windows Azure Cloud Services.