(Cloud)Tip of the Day: What applications can I run in PaaS?

Today’s (Cloud) Tip… What applications can I run in PaaS?

PaaS roles abstract away the OS and infrastructure components and provide a platform on which you can layer your code. Although not a perfect analogy, one way to think about them is to think about the way IIS works. You don’t have to know anything about how it functions. Instead, you just need to register your web application and then copy over necessary files. Where PaaS roles go on better is that not only can you do web applications, but you can also develop and deploy services in the same way.

Because PaaS roles are stateless unless the end users creates a way to save state, we tend to see things like web applications or data processing applications.

In addition, many of our cloud services leverage PaaS roles. For example, portions of the Office 365 portal are PaaS web roles. Another example is the Azure SQL Database Import/Export Service. It leverages worker roles.