Comparison - PaaS and IaaS

Let's visualize how the process workflow is executed in terms of a traditional model or in IaaS, and then we will compare it with PaaS. In a traditional environment, the infrastructure provisioning process takes place in a different manner than the acquisition of a virtual machine in a cloud subscription.

While in the case of PaaS, the flow has less complications than the traditional or IaaS process.

However, the approval process in the cloud environment too has costs associated with it, so organizations keep their own sets of e-mail approval processes to create a virtual machine or to provision any PaaS offering.

Over the years, PaaS has gained its momentum and many organizations have realized that there are less complexities and less management overhead involved in it. Hence, many customers are leaning towards the PaaS offering, as they don't wish to manage virtual machines and apply security policies in the cloud and maintain all of them. In IaaS, as users, we need to configure high availability and scalability, and it is more complicated compared with PaaS.

PaaS offerings manage load balancers and high availability with little configuration and hence save a lot of time, and the architecture is more clear. We need to remember that most of the control is available with cloud service providers and hence we have less things to manage. Cloud service providers have more control and they implement all the best practices and a standard pattern to fulfill the SLAs attached with PaaS offerings. Governance wise, PaaS is less flexible in terms of applying policies as it is a shared environment and is standardized as well. Managing PaaS is also less costly compared with IaaS. In the case of IaaS, we need to manage everything the way we manage on-premise.

In short, those who know better about infrastructures and platforms manage them with efficiency so we have less overhead.

An Application Platform as a Service (aPaaS) provides features to design, develop, deploy, and manage an application life cycle, enabling effective resource utilization, agility, and faster time to market. It is getting popular now-a-days as it has less overhead and less complexities of managing resources for the application life cycle management. Usage of thick clients is an old story now and PaaS providers have realized the trend. Developers want offerings all in once place where they can develop, compile, package, and deploy at them. PaaS is accessed through web browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer. Most PaaS providers have come up with offerings to support developers within browser IDEs to develop applications. In recent times, DevOps has also gained momentum and PaaS along with the DevOps culture is breaking a lot of barriers in the traditional culture of IT. In the next section, we will discuss DevOps and then we will see benefits of PaaS in DevOps.