In this cloud training tutorial, I am going to cover one of our Cloud models which is PaaS, Platform as a Service. Scroll down for the video and also text tutorial.
This is part of my ‘Practical Introduction to Cloud Computing’ course. Click here to enroll in the complete course for free!Cloud PaaS Platform as a Service Video Tutorial NIST defined PaaS as “The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.”
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| Looking at how this map to our datacenter stack, with PaaS, the provider is going to provide all of the underlying hardware infrastructure and the underlying operating system. The provider will also provide a custom environment, which is used for building applications.
That is the level where the customer gets in. The customer is going to be managing the applications that they build and any data on top of that. |
| The point of PaaS is to make it quicker for customers to be able to get their applications into deployment. They don’t have to worry about building out the underlying infrastructure and supporting that.
They can just get straight into this custom environment where they can quickly build their applications. Also, with this custom environment, it will have various plugins there that make it easier to build the applications. For example, the customer is building an e-commerce application. There are modules in the PaaS environment for things like adding a shopping cart or adding live chat. The developer can pull modules straight in without having to code from scratch. It makes the development very quick, very convenient, and very cost-effective. PaaS Examples |
| The popular PaaS provider, AWS, has got Elastic Beanstalk. Microsoft Azure also provides both IaaS and PaaS. Google Apps, Salesforce Force.com and IBM Bluemix are other examples. Salesforce has traditionally been a SaaS or software as a service provider, but they’ve also moved into the PaaS space as well with Force.com.
PaaS BillingFor the billing of PaaS, it will be typically billed based on memory usage. Let’s have a look at the IBM Bluemix pricing structure for an example. On the Bluemix pricing page, you’ll see that there’s a free trial available where you get up to two gigs worth of runtime and container memory.
You can also go with the Pay As You Go plan and only pay for what you use. You get half a gig of free runtime and container memory. There are various subscription plans as well. That’s how the pricing works. |
| Let’s have a quick look at how it actually works. I’m really not a developer, so I’m just going to give you a quick overview of this. I’ve already signed up for the Bluemix trial, so I’ll click on the login button here. I’d already entered my credentials, so it’s taking me straight to the Create Space popup. |
| I’ve already added my organization as FlackBox. It’s telling me I don’t have a space in the US region, so it’s asking me to enter a name. I’ll call it FlackboxDemo and click on create. I get the option to create an app so I’ll click on that, then I’ll choose a Cloud Foundry app.
I get options for different programming languages, I can use Java, Node.js, Python, etc. If I went to the containers page, you’ll see that Docker is also supported. If I go to Watson, you can see some of the services that I can pull in such as text-to-speech or vice-versa, speech to text and I can also do personality insights. |
Additional Resources
What is PaaS?: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/what-is-paas/
PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/paas
Libby Teofilo
Text by Libby Teofilo, Technical Writer at www.flackbox.com
With a mission to spread network awareness through writing, Libby consistently immerses herself into the unrelenting process of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. If not engrossed in technology, you might see her with a book in one hand and a coffee in the other.