Programming for PaaS

Chapter 8. Why Not PaaS?

Much of this book has focused on the benefits of PaaS and the compelling reasons why you might consider using a PaaS provider. But this chapter will take a look at the other side of the coin: in what situations might PaaS not be advantageous?

The answer depends on who you are and where you are coming from. If you are a developer within an enterprise, if you are working in a small- to medium-sized business, or if you are an independent developer or a hacker, the constraints are very different. In each of these cases, you’ll be looking at Platform-as-a-Service through different lenses. And through those lenses, you’ll also need to consider the pros and cons of the two very different ways to use PaaS: the public cloud PaaS and the private cloud PaaS.

Public Cloud versus Private Cloud

The public cloud usually runs on a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform (e.g., Amazon Web Services), and that’s where you’ll find PaaS providers like Heroku, EngineYard, and AppFog. In many PaaS options, you do not get to choose where exactly your code is run. You don’t have much control over what is going on in the service, nor do you get to see the underpinnings of the operating system. You provide the code and the PaaS does the rest. The downside is that you do not get to have much insight into what is actually going on in the servers.

What Is Private Cloud?

In general, the term ”private cloud” refers to a cloud computing platform that runs on hardware you control. Private ...