A Guide to PaaS and Its Pricing

1. A Guide to PaaS and Its Pricing The concept of Platform as a Service first cropped up in 2005 in private data centers. It was built by SysAdmins and launched officially by the London-based company, Fotango, also known as “Zimki” in 2006. What is PaaS Before coming to the benefits and what PaaS pricing depends on, it is necessary to understand what this Platform as a Service is about. In short, PaaS is a computing model based in the cloud. It offers developers a platform where they can seamlessly develop, deploy, and run many applications. The objective of PaaS is rapid development and is the most critical reason why it can eliminate the costs and complexity that are generally linked to configuring, deploying, and managing the required infrastructure.  What is the cost of PaaS? Evaluating PaaS pricing is by no means a straightforward job as several variables need to be considered. Some of them include the extent of multi-dimensional usage, pitfalls such as required bandwidth, backups, and operational regions, and special licensing costs if applicable.

2. Further, the type of PaaS services preferred such as hosted or self-hosted and unlimited or hourly access also affect PaaS pricing. Depending on the need of an organization, the cost of PaaS can range from a few dollars to multiple thousands every month. The goal of optimizing PaaS pricing is to ensure that it fits into the existing IT infrastructure seamlessly at a low cost as well as scaling the size and cost of the platform as per actual usage.

3. When deployed optimally, PaaS pricing is very competitive and cost-effective when compared to traditional data centers or cloud hosting providers. It is because of this relatively low cost that PaaS is considered the ideal alternative for hosting costly traditional applications and current web applications. When the exclusive emphasis on SLDC and developer experience is taken into account, the low PaaS pricing is a huge incentive to operate on the cloud. Characteristics of PaaS The only common characteristic between PaaS and other models such as IaaS, DaaS, and Software as a Service (SaaS) is that the PaaS technology follows the shared responsibility model. On the one hand, PaaS users have to input the code and data of their applications and the custom runtimes. On the other, the PaaS provider delivers certain specific services such as platform runtime, middleware, operating system, virtualization, servers and storage, and networking. The PaaS pricing depends on the quantum of these resources used. Why makes PaaS unique? To know those characteristics, understand first that apart from having only one PaaS implementation per platform, there is also a common model and scheme between them. A PaaS platform has an infrastructure of servers, networks and storage, can install and configure OS, offers bootstrapping and server deployment, and provide middleware services such as database, messaging service, cache storage, and more. The types of middleware provided depend primarily on the choice of PaaS and its implementation.