Thin Client – Explaining the Cloud: What the Heck is PaaS Anyway?

By | July 13, 2015

The enterprise is in the middle of an explosion of growth in mobility and data. The old, insular model for developing “in-house” solutions is showing its age—in many cases on-premise IT simply can’…

Source: solutions-review.com

Good read.  

Excerpt:  In the past, enterprise cloud adoption was primarily focused on software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, but lately there’s been an increasing call for enterprise adoption of the middle sibling of the cloud family: platform as a service (PaaS).


So what is PaaS? And why is it so important?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a model of cloud computing in which a vendor provides the user with the hardware and software tools necessary to create, deploy and manage applications at scale via the internet, as a service.  Here’s how renowned IT research and advisory firm Gartner, Inc. defines PaaS in their IT glossary:

“A [PaaS] offering, usually depicted in all cloud diagrams between the SaaS layer above it and the IaaS layer below, is a broad collection of applicationinfrastructure (middleware) services (including application platform, integration, business process management, and database services). However, the hype surrounding the PaaS concept is focused mainly on application PaaS as the representative of the whole category.”