How is PaaS taking IaaS to the background?

Cloud Computing has evolved into a reliable technology and a dependable service delivery mechanism. The debate of PaaS versus IaaS is the hottest issue in the clod computing community. It is very clear that PaaS is gaining ground and IaaS is slowly becoming a thing of past. 

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is fast becoming the most reliable cloud computing model for many organizations.

Rise of IaaS

The rise of mobile computing and on-the-go workforce means that an organization simply cannot afford the hassle and the conflicts of different platforms and technologies. This problem was solved by the Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Cloud computing gained mainstream recognition and the industry was born.

The availability of reliable hardware infrastructure meant that organizations could focus on developing their applications and leave the availability and distribution issues to the IaaS vendor. Amazon Web Services is now the largest IaaS vendor in the world.

Problems with IaaS

Not every organization is capable of developing applications for their business. Fewer still are staffed and equipped for developing cloud computing solutions on a commercial scale. Another issue is the maintenance and development of applications that run on a specific IaaS vendor’s solution.

IaaS appears to be cost effective at first but as the development costs mount, that monetary advantage is lost, in many cases forever. Maintenance of the IaaS based service structure often turns into a technological and financial nightmare as code become obsolete and newer (and often incompatible) hardware is installed by the vendor.

In Comes PaaS

The paradigm of PaaS was developed to counter these shortcomings. The fact that PaaS is gaining recognition in a market dominated by IaaS is testimony enough that the paradigm has a lot of community support.

Let us see how PaaS fares against IaaS.

·         PaaS solutions take care of the administrative tasks. This is hassle number one for many organizations that lack relevant technical expertise.

·         PaaS offer a ready built platform for developing, testing and deploying applications.

·         Scaling of applications becomes very easy in a PaaS environment. IaaS offers just the hardware support and nothing more.

The advantage of the Platform

PaaS offers the best of IaaS and something more. This simple fact is the basis of the rise of PaaS.  

A PaaS solution includes the underlying hardware, network and computing resources that a similar IaaS solution offers. The edge of PaaS comes with its application development platform. This environment offers complete development solution. 

The beauty of PaaS is the fine balance between custom development and vendor control. Many PaaS stacks like Google App Engine and Engine Yard offer both underlying hardware infrastructure and a reliable development environment.

The organizations just have to develop components that interface with the PaaS APIs. This approach saves on administration costs that many consider as sunk costs. 

PaaS offers the best of IaaS with additional features of efficient code development. Many IaaS vendors have already moved on to PaaS in response to the changes in customer preferences.