Programming for PaaS

Chapter 7. A Look at Core Services

When selecting a PaaS provider, it is important to understand what exactly you are getting yourself into. This chapter will focus on core services, not just the running of an application. When we talk about core services, we’re talking about functions that provide data storage, SQL, NoSQL, queuing, and other support for applications. These core services can also include email monitoring, caching and data management, consumption and analysis, each of which can be an entire application of its own.

Typically a PaaS provider will manage the core services itself, or through a third-party add-on system that integrates tightly with the PaaS. Either way, when using PaaS you do not end up managing many of the core services yourself. This can clearly be beneficial (what developer really wants to spend her time tuning my.cnf files?), but it has some significant trade-offs as well, which we will explore in this chapter.

The goal for this chapter is to help you know what to expect from PaaS-based core services and what questions to ask potential PaaS providers before you commit to running production code on their systems.

Non-PaaS Core Services

PaaS is, by its nature, a very managed environment. You do not have to worry about scaling. You do not have to worry about the operations behind your application. You just know that you need to have it scale up or scale out; the major decisions are whether the app needs more RAM capacity or more instances. That will come ...