Platform As A Service

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service. Along with software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it is a service model of cloud computing. In this model, the consumer creates the software using tools and/or libraries from the provider. The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services.

PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities.

There are various types of PaaS vendors; however, all offer application hosting and a deployment environment, along with various integrated services. Services offer varying levels of scalability and maintenance.

PaaS offerings may also include facilities for application design, application development, testing and deployment as well as services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation and developer community facilitation.