PaaS shifts the computing capabilities from data centre to the cloud providers.

Cloud services have developed over the past few years. Unlike the last century, where organizations relied heavily upon servers to store data and continue operations, the cloud computing platforms leverage many technologies from cloud storage to cloud analytics for feasible business operations. Undoubtedly, cloud computing has become the fastest adopted subset of artificial intelligence in the industry. Realizing the capabilities of cloud computing, the big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft are investing a major share of their funding towards cloud offerings. Cloud computing offers IT-enabled capabilities to organizations without any need of hardware to store data. Being scalable, elastic and efficient, cloud computing offers three types of services to the clients: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Depending upon the organization's type and need, the vendors can offer either of the services.

This article discusses PaaS and its top vendors for customers to choose from different providers.

What is Platform-as-a-Service?

Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS shifts the computing capabilities from a customer data centre to the cloud provider. PaaS offers the pre-built computing infrastructure and development tools to support the software development environment. PaaS contributes to scaling up the operating system, database management systems, server-side scripting environments, server software, storage, network access, design tools, development tools and application hosting.

It focuses on delivering computing environments such as operating systems, network, servers, and storage. This ensures data protection, scalability, load balancing, failover, and security up-gradation for cloud offerings. It also aims at building and managing the libraries, services, frameworks, testing and programming languages. PaaS offers customers' resources to build, deploy and manage software applications, such as apps and tools, hosting, databases, cloud security and data storage.

PaaS is efficient, elastic and scalable for a multi-cloud environment.  

PaaS Vendors

PaaS ensures a promising outcome thus making big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft Azure to offer diverse features for scaling up their services. Undoubtedly the market of PaaS is huge, which compels the customers to choose from different offerings. But choices for deploying PaaS must be in alignment with the organizations' infrastructure and needs. Here are the top PaaS providers which help in scaling up cloud operations of organizations.

1. Amazon Web Services- Suitable for start-ups and enterprises, the PaaS solution by AWS is considered to be amongst the highest recommended solutions by the experts. It is feasible to deploy and scale up web applications, and the services are offered in a variety of language like Python, Java, NET etc. Moreover, due to its serverless computing capabilities, the codes work only with trigger runs, offering customers to only pay for codes that are running in the system. Some examples of AWS PaaS are AWS Elastic Compute cloud, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda.

2. Microsoft Azure- Suitable for legacy client workforce, this PaaS from Azure allows an easy transition for Windows Developer to the cloud platform. Working similar to AWS Lambda through code-triggers, this service can host a variety of mobile apps for IOS, Android, Windows, Xamarin. Additionally, it builds business logic with SaaS and associated enterprise apps. It works best for organizations having private cloud infrastructure.

3. Google App Engine-Recognized as the heavy-duty platform, it builds and hosts applications on the system similar to that powered by Google applications by using Python, Java, and PHP. With enhanced security, it ensures scaled up splitting of apps, traffic and IoT. Its Kubernetes Engine, helps customers to easily run their Docker containers, similar to AWS Lambda.

4. Salesforce Platform- Recognised as the pioneer in providing SaaS to its customers, Salesforce automates business processes with the help of PaaS tools. It builds customer-connected apps and assists the clients with compliance, transparency and governance rules to their apps. By offering a secured environment for building and testing apps, this service also initiates the back-end on-premises system and aid in identifying users.

5. Red Hat OpenShift- Owned by IBM, one of the key features of its service is the easiest deployment. It offers Integrated Development environment and helps in building Docker-formatted containers to manage Kubernetes. Moreover, it is made up of four different services, running on the same technology. Openshift Container Platform is the main service. Openshift Online offers services to the developers seeking public-cloud offerings. Openshift Dedicated offers services to the customers who are focused on enhanced performance whereas OpenShift.i.o. provides a free end-to-end service for building cloud-native applications.

6. Cloud Foundry-Developed by VMware, and transferred to pivotal software, it is one of the best Open-source stalwarts for multi-cloud environment recommended by the experts. It supports multiple languages and helps running the code in multiple languages. Its features are routing, authentication, application lifecycle, application storage and execution,sService brokers, messaging, metrics and logging.

7. Mendix- Recognized as the low-code PaaS Solution, Mendix offers rapid app PaaS system. Being comprehensive, it offers integrated tools and platform services for app lifecycle and accelerates the process of initial design and deployment of the app with less code, thus making the entire process faster, requiring less expertise from developers.

8. Dokku-For those users who are looking for PaaS solution for the average scalable environment, Dokku is the best option. Termed as the Smallest PaaS implementation ever seen, it is only suitable to run over the server, on which it gets deployed. This means it offers small, low traffic and restricted environments.