Programming for PaaS

Chapter 1. The Cloud for Developers

One day, not long ago, Jason Gendron had an idea.

What if he could create a community of Twitter friends, so that instead of just following each other, users might actually have bidirectional communication? Jason, a Chicago-based developer, wrote some code, registered the domain name twitclub.com, and deployed it on a dedicated server. Success was immediate. In a few months, over 80,000 people were using the service. But with success came challenges—the kind of challenges you always say you will be glad to have if only you succeed.

With 80,000 users, Jason was spending half his time handling operations and half his time doing development. He spent less time innovating and more time running the actual app. Before long, hackers compromised his self-configured servers. The hackers sent out terabytes of data, leaving him with an enormous bill. The net result: he was devoting most of his time to battling with servers and not enough to writing code.

Only a few months later, Jason turned to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which allowed him to outsource all the maintenance responsibilities, from software updates to security patches. The benefits were immediately clear. Suddenly he was able to stop thinking about the operations side of his idea, letting his PaaS provider deal with it. That enabled him to spend 100% of his time innovating. Soon he was able to actually quit his day job and devote all his time to his startup, bootstrapping it into a profitable ...