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These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. 16 Platform as a Service For Dummies, Special Edition In this section, we describe just how PaaS can help, including standardizing middleware, easing provisioning, working across the organization, and improving control. Reducing complexity with a PaaS The complexity of many IT environments results in highlyskilled developers spending too much time working on manual tasks and solving operational problems. In a PaaS environment, capabilities ranging from compilers, development tools, data management, security, and middleware are abstracted (the concept is separated from the implementation instance). In most PaaS environments, infrastructure details are hidden from the developer. Instead, the PaaS environment provides an interface that exposes typical features and use cases developers are primarily concerned with, such as versioning and roll-backing of applications — not servers — pushing an application from development to production in simple steps or implementing high availability for a given application. A well-designed PaaS environment can automate routine tasks and help improve collaboration between development and operations teams through the ways in this section. Standardizing middleware infrastructure services PaaS is hosted middleware (for example, software that connects application components) that sits on top of IaaS. You can think about the role of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) within the environment as doing the work to allocate memory, disk, and the like. In contrast, a PaaS platform sitting on top of IaaS, provides seamless integration with middleware, such as databases and distributed caching technologies, to ensure zero data and transaction loss in the face of truly elastic underlying IaaS. SaaS sits on top of the combination of IaaS and PaaS. This layering helps to reduce complexity and ensure consistency and management of resources. Ease of service provisioning A PaaS provides easy provisioning of development services, including build, test, and repository services to help eliminate bottlenecks associated with non-standard environments, which in turn improves efficiency, reduces errors, and ensures
These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Chapter 2: Getting into Platform as a Service 17 consistency in the management of the development lifecycle. Additionally, PaaS provides ease of provisioning in runtime services, including application runtime containers for staging, running, and scaling applications. Minimizing friction with IT Traditionally, when a new application server or other middleware was introduced into an organization, IT needed to make sure that the middleware could access other services that were part of the application. Development and Quality Assurance (QA) had to wait for IT to help them with this — sometimes causing intradepartmental friction. With PaaS, conflict is minimized because all middleware is easier to manage and connect. Improving the control over IT resources In PaaS, resources can be acquired from a pool of shared software assets by using a self-service process. When the resource is no longer needed by the developer, it can be automatically returned. This empowers development and QA to drive processes and reduce demands on IT. Improving collaboration PaaS changes the way that development and operations interact with resources. Instead of traditional application development being hand offs, with PaaS, the state of software becomes more visible to the organization. For instance, a developer may say that a module of an application is complete, but he hasn’t tested it on all Web browsers. With PaaS, the team can see whether software is working, broken, ready to be released to manufacturing, staged, and so on across the entire application lifecycle. You can buy this functionality, but it’s native to PaaS. To leverage many of the benefits of PaaS, you may need to make a tradeoff. For example, if you want to update your application and choose to go with tools that aren’t part of the prescribed environment, the process can still be done, but you lose some of the efficiency of working within a more controlled environment. If you break the mold and do it outside the framework, you need to do it manually. In other words, you can be locked into the vendor’s platform tools.
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