15 Important PaaS Examples | UNext Jigsaw
What is PaaS in Cloud Computing?
Platform as a Service, or PaaS, saves teams the time and resources involved in building solutions. Instead, they can choose a pre-built platform that provides the foundational capabilities of the intended code and spend their resources determining the features and utility ideal for the required solution. Let us take a look at some great PaaS examples.
List of PaaS Examples
1. SAP Cloud
SAP Cloud is a great example of PaaS in cloud computing. SAP Cloud isn’t as much a platform itself as it is a vast collection of apps allowing you to create apps over a wide range of domains. SAP Cloud has over 1300 apps built into it, all made accessible over the cloud.
SAP Jam and The SAP Documentation Center are great collaboration apps that can be used in the workplace. SAP also provides some very useful tools for analytics and has an app for IoT and security applications. The data storage and development operations services available on the SAP cloud are used worldwide.
2. Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is perhaps one of the most popular PaaS examples that you will come across. It’s popularity may be credited to the fact that it is so widely used across the world. Microsoft Azure is so expansive that it includes all three basic cloud models. It can support every step in the app development process, from the first piece of code to the final deployment of the code.
Microsoft Azure allows you the flexibility to code in ASP.NET, PHP, or Node.js. It helps firms develop the simplest capability to easily migrate all their apps and infrastructure. It includes mobile services as well as advanced applications in business analytics. You can get started with Microsoft Azure at a low cost and pay as your applications’ traffic and scale increase.
3. Heroku
Heroku is not as much an enterprise platform as a service solution as it is a self-contained system that is centered around apps. It also has space for data integration but is mostly made up of ecosystems accessible entirely within the platform. It is known for its intuitive and user-friendly UI. Its ease of use has made it a favorite among production developers and those developing apps just for fun. However, it isn’t considered the most scalable of PaaS examples.
The Developer Experience Module included in Heroku allows you to deploy directly from popular repositories such as GitHub and Git and contains a dashboard that allows you to add apps and utilities to your solution easily. It is regularly updated and patched and is compatible with a wide host of languages.
4. AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a part of the AWS Cloud. It is completely integrable with all the different AWS services and contains a serverless architecture. AWS Lambda allows its users to build custom backend services that can be triggered on demand through the use of custom API endpoints.
AWS is widely integrable with nearly every third-party library and language. The platform’s administration is completely automated, allowing users to focus only on the services they intend to provide. The platform is highly fault-tolerant and developed to protect the user’s code against machine language errors, allowing it to run smoothly and without a hitch. AWS Lambda can automatically scale to the level of incoming support requests.
5. Google App Engine
Google App Engine is among the many PaaS examples that are a part of a whole suite of services. Google App Engine is a part of the Google Cloud and offers highly scalable apps and tools that can be used as a part of your service. It is compatible with many languages, even though some key options seem to have been missed.
Its scalability ensures a much more improved time to market and automates scalability as traffic increases. Besides, it is also easy to use and compatible with a large and diverse set of APIs. Google App Engine is serverless and available continuously without any downtime.
6. Dokku
Dokku is billed as the smallest PaaS platform that has ever been created. Due to its small size, the features it offers to developers are limited. However, its high user base may be attributed to its being completely free and open source.
Doku is built on a container-based Docker platform. It offers wide integration, even though scalability is expectedly limited. Dokku offers multiple methods of deployment and guides you through every step of the deployment process. It also helps you with configuration, integration, and network management. In addition, it contains a number of schedulers.
Probably the greatest asset of Dokku is its large base of users, which aggregate in the Dokku community and help drive the platform’s development.
7. Apprenda Cloud Platform
Apprenda Cloud Platform is one of those enterprise PaaS examples that borrow from open-source solutions to improve their robustness. The unique selling point of Apprenda Cloud Platform is its ability to transition services from traditional applications running on dot net to a PaaS environment.
Apprenda allows you to rapidly deploy and run applications built on Java as well as dot net. The developer and the IT operations in the platform are completely automated, and control is placed in the hands of the programmers. Programmers also get the capability to define the security policy of their applications. Apprenda allows you to run multiple clouds, whether private or public.
8. Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the perfect example of PaaS in cloud computing. It is a distribution of the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. Cloud Foundry is a powerful framework for the fast development and deployment of applications.
The workflows of Cloud Foundry are highly streamlined, and the framework itself is very scalable. It allows for portability and automatic scaling of applications. In addition, it also contains tools for application health management and infrastructure security.
Cloud Foundry supports most APIs, and it also provides role-based access to applications that have been deployed. Pivotal Cloud Foundry adds a few additional features to what was already provided by Cloud Foundry, such as offering a more user-friendly experience and making updates smoother.
9. Salesforce Lightning
Salesforce has always been highly preferred among platforms as a service, but Salesforce Lightning is considered the next generation of the PaaS platform. It offers a host of new features and great updates to old ones. It offers a much-improved user interface that is dashboard based and easy to use.
It contains interactive tabs as well as an activity timeline that make the task of rapid application development and deployment much easier for both the frontend users and the backend IT side. Salesforce lightning’s homepage is a great example of simplicity, even in the most complex of applications.
The most loved feature of Salesforce Lightning has been the virtual assistant, which isn’t just very helpful but also seems capable of getting you exactly what you want.
10. IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Foundry is an open-source PaaS example that is still extremely powerful. While it can’t be called nearly as capable as its other counterparts developed by IT majors, it does offer some really useful features and, over the years, has been scaling up to get into the big leagues. IBM Cloud Foundry supports various languages, from Java to PHP and Python to Ruby.
In addition, their build packs are regularly updated on the IBM Cloud Foundry Community. It is also highly fault-tolerant and allows your application to run smoothly and without hotches caused by code errors.
11. Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift is supposed to provide users with a significantly easier platform to create and deploy applications. It is compatible with a wide range of APIs, ensuring that the user is never restricted just to what is included in the platform.
There are various features that Red Hat OpenShift has to offer to its users. It is based on Kubernetes, and all its elements are made available on the cloud. It contains a simple user interface, and perhaps its greatest feature is its security options to stave off intrusion and prevent unauthorized access internally.
12. Oracle Cloud Platform
The Oracle Cloud Platform is yet another among the PaaS examples used primarily at the enterprise level. Oracle Cloud Platform allows you to run Oracle as well as non-Oracle applications smoothly on its servers. It is highly secure and offers great flexibility with APIs.
It is also great at providing analytical tools on the cloud, which can improve the applications you have built. You can also choose the method you want to use for greater flexibility in the deployment process.
13. Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator is perhaps the simplest to use among the PaaS examples you will find here. It is not a very complex platform, nor does it have any highly sophisticated tools or utilities, but its ease of use makes it a considerably popular choice among beginners and learners. It is as easy as dragging and dropping tools in a dashboard and is centered around making the application development a visual process rather than one based on code. It also contains quite a few useful automation options.
14. Wasabi
Wasabi is a platform as a service example meant for individual use or for small to medium-sized businesses. It is very easy to set up and has a clean user interface, making application development a task that takes much less time than usual. It is among the platform service providers that are not yet enterprise-scale yet contain many highly scalable utilities and features.
15. Cloudways
Cloudways is among the platform service providers that use web hosting as a strategy. While it contains useful tools for rapid application development and deployment, it has widely been used to create virtual web servers. This is probably due to the feature of managed web hosting, which makes the task much simpler. It is not open source but is pretty transparent about its features, pricing, and code compatibility.
Conclusion
The above PaaS examples are market leaders for rapid application development and deployment, and each has its unique selling point. PaaS platform usage will only grow in the coming years as more citizen developers use them to create applications.
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