Cloud computing approach is rapidly evolving to deliver an online service over an Internet network. Cloud computing allows access to files and applications from any device that has Internet access. Online banking and your mailbox are some examples of cloud services.

Cloud computing offers almost all capabilities of information technology (IT) system through cloud services. Platform capabilities, infrastructure capabilities, and application capabilities are cloud services.

Platform capabilities are the cloud services that customers can develop, manage, deploy, and run applications with the use of one or more execution environments, which are supported by the service providers. This cloud service is known as Platform as a service (PaaS).

Let us understand what is PaaS in cloud computing for cloud service customers.

• PaaS, in cloud computing, typically involves varied application software infrastructure (middleware) capabilities including application, integration, mobile backend services, business analytics platforms, and event-streaming services. A PaaS offering also includes a set of management, monitoring, deployment, and related capabilities.
• PaaS is primarily aimed at application developers and also includes capabilities that interest operators. PaaS represents a cloud service rendering of the application infrastructure provided by entities such as business process management systems, database management systems, application servers, event processing systems, integration brokers, and rules engines. This application infrastructure helps the developer in decreasing the amount of code involved in business applications writing.

The essence of the PaaS system is that service provider of the cloud takes responsibility for the configuration as well as installation. It also offers the infrastructure and operation of an application. Application code is the only responsibility of the cloud service customer.

The offering of PaaS expands on middleware’s platform capabilities by offering developers varied and ever-increasing set of services. PaaS offerings provide capabilities that enable the applications to take advantage of the cloud system characteristics.

PaaS systems can be deployed either as public cloud services or as private cloud services. Private cloud deployment may be less efficient than a public cloud due to reduced opportunities for resource sharing that result in increasing the costs. For private cloud deployment, the cloud service customer should be skilled in installing as well as operating the PaaS system.