As described in the last week’s post NIST defines three different cloud computing service models – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. IaaS and SaaS are really easy to grasp but I see people struggling to understand the PaaS model. As a long-time application developer though I find the PaaS model the most compelling one for new applications. Here is why.
I will look at two examples: one enterprise and one from the consumer world.
Let’s start with the enterprise scenario. If you examine any enterprise application portfolio you will find out that almost every development team has implemented it’s own code for handling common functionality like authentication, authorization, database access etc. There are also numerous cases when the same team developed the same functionality over and over in each new project. Even the componentization model doesn’t help in this situation because either developers are often not aware of the existence of the components or there are too many options they can choose from and they cannot find the right fit for their scenario. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the holly grail for this problem but many enterprises are still far from achieving this goal.