Cloud Computing Basics—Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Mitesh Soni — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 19:14:41 +0000

Generally, good programming is considered to be the measured application of an art form, craft or discipline, with the objective of producing a competent and evolving business solution. In traditional environments, computer programming is a practice that has multiple phases, such as designing, developing, testing, debugging and maintaining application code. We programmers use programming languages like C, C++, C#, Java, Python and Smalltalk to create business applications. The process of writing code often requires proficiency in many diverse subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, runtime environment, specific algorithms, programming languages and proper logic.

Figure 1. Programming

In addition, developing and deploying applications is a complex, expensive and time-consuming task. Business applications require hardware resources, operating systems, databases, middleware, Web servers and other software. Once the technology stack and hardware resources are available, a team of developers needs to navigate frameworks, such as J2EE and .NET, for development. A dedicated team of network, database and IT management experts keeps resources and applications available.

Inevitably, business requirements will require changes in the application, which results in a lengthy development, testing and re-deployment cycle. Furthermore, large organizations need specialized facilities to house their data centers and a team to maintain them. A gigantic amount of electricity is used to power the servers as well as to keep them cool.

If you think the complexities end here, then wait. A failover site holds significant importance to mirror the data center so that information and resources can be replicated in case of disaster. Applications built with these complexities are difficult to scale for usage spike demands, fragile to update, and difficult to make mobile and social as business needs change.

Modern Application Programming and Its Challenges

Modern programming has changed in a different manner due to the explosion of devices. Expanding data and new business requirements need different approaches from the previous era. Considering either the traditional approach or modern approach, business applications must satisfy some fundamental properties, such as automation, reliability, robustness, performance and availability. Unfortunately, even in modern times, automated build and test environments don't exist in many organizations, and best practices are not applied everywhere in the software development life cycle.

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Finally, "The Cloud" Means Something

Shawn Powers — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:51:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, "The Cloud." When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, "let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud."

Then, finally, the concept started to solidify into offering specific services or entire software applications as a commodity removed from the server infrastructure. Honestly, I think that was the intent from the beginning, but it took several years before anyone really implemented anything useful in, "the cloud."

Software as a service (SaaS) is arguably the largest implementation of the "cloud" ideology. I had never really heard of "Platform as a Service" (PaaS) before reading up on the upcoming IBM webinar here at Linux Journal. (Full disclosure: I'm sure there is a financial partnership of some sort involved with the webinar. I don't know those details, I'm writing because I found it interesting!)

In my DayJob situation, I need to deploy a Java based application for our intranet. Since we don't have a Java application server environment, the biggest chore for me is figuring out what application server, or what servlet container to implement. Then I have to configure it, maintain it, and keep it updated with both Java itself and the web server components. That's where PaaS comes in. Instead of buying a software package as a service (SaaS), PaaS allows me to deploy whatever Java applications I want onto a fully installed, maintained, and updated Java application server.

The PaaS concept piqued my interest, and perhaps it piques yours. At the very least it gives more meat to the concept of "cloud computing", which is always a good thing. Oh, and for the record? Shared web hosting was cloud computing long before it was cool, just saying.

NOTE FROM WEBMISTRESS: The webinar Shawn referred to is HERE, and it's coming up soon!

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