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These materials are the copyright of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and any<br />
dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.<br />
18<br />
Platform as a Service For Dummies, Special Edition<br />
PaaS and the application lifecycle<br />
In PaaS, the application lifecycle from development through<br />
testing, staging, and deployment is baked into the platform.<br />
The development and runtime platforms are provided as services,<br />
so the formal lifecycle of an application is more directly<br />
supported. For example, developers and test teams interact<br />
with the same hosted application and runtime as the operations<br />
people use.<br />
One of the impacts of having an abstracted platform is that<br />
it supports development to deployment to operation procedures<br />
that today are mostly manual, which helps support agile<br />
development (discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4).<br />
Removing the manual processes enables faster development<br />
release cycles, which in turn can support more rigorous methods<br />
around quality and continuous integration.<br />
PaaS as Middleware<br />
in the Cloud<br />
Middleware is the glue that helps connect software components<br />
and is a critical method of delivering standardized<br />
application services, but it can be complicated. When middleware<br />
services are hosted, like they are in a PaaS, they can<br />
provide a development team with the ability to pre-determine<br />
how the organization wants connectivity to happen and how<br />
integration between services is handled. IT management can<br />
then set the rules upfront about what types of services to use<br />
under specific business conditions.<br />
For example, an organization may want to mandate the use of<br />
a specific database for an application because of the need to<br />
have sufficient transaction speed. Because this abstraction<br />
of middleware is service based, its Application Programming<br />
Interfaces (APIs) are typically well defined, so managing the<br />
integration is simplified.<br />
You used to have to install resources and interact with them<br />
on your machines. Now, those services are managed and<br />
made available to you with PaaS. You’ll see some key differences<br />
between PaaS and traditional middleware:
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