Platform as a Service

Of all the service models, PaaS is the hardest to definitively characterize due to both the wide range of PaaS offerings and the many ways of building PaaS services. PaaS adds an additional layer of integration with application development frameworks, middleware capabilities, and functions such as databases, messaging, and queuing. These services allow developers to build applications on the platform with programming languages and tools that are supported by the stack.
One option, frequently seen in the real world and illustrated in our model, is to build a platform on top of IaaS. A layer of integration and middleware is built on IaaS, then pooled together, orchestrated, and exposed to customers using APIs as PaaS. For example, a Database as a Service could be built by deploying modified database management system software on instances running in IaaS. The customer manages the database via API (and a web console) and accesses it either through the normal database network protocols, or, again, via API.
In PaaS the cloud consumer only sees the platform, not the underlying infrastructure. In our example, the database expands (or contracts) as needed based on utilization, without the customer having to manage individual servers, networking, patches, etc.
Another example is an application deployment platform. That's a place where developers can load and run application code without managing the underlying resources. Services exist for running nearly any kind of application in any language on PaaS, freeing the developers from configuring and building servers, keeping them up to date, or worrying about complexities like clustering and load balancing.
This simplified architecture diagram shows an application platform (PaaS) running on top of our IaaS architecture:
Simplified PaaS Architecture
PaaS doesn't necessarily need to be built on top of IaaS; there is no reason it cannot be a custom-designed stand-alone architecture. The defining characteristic is that consumers access and manage the platform, not the underlying infrastructure (including cloud infrastructure).

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