There are two common delivery models in cloud computing  IaaS and PaaS. They offer users different levels of control to provide software and hardware services on-demand from a remote host.

Automation That Saves Time

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has great benefits for software developers. Clients receive the tools and services necessary for coding and deploying applications without purchasing and maintaining software and infrastructure. It allows the creation of software utilizing proprietary data from applications. Clients can also use PaaS to create applications with common data form. It is good for people with existing data sources, such as customer accounts, and create applications for data use. It can also automate testing and deploying of services. PaaS is not good where applications need higher portability or when proprietary languages have an influence on the development process.

Efficiency With Low Costs

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers the hardware and software to power servers, storage, networks and operating systems as on-demand services. IaaS is offered as either public or private infrastructure. Public is outsources as shared resources on a self service basis over the Internet. While private has the characteristic virtualizations but does so on a private network. Clients receive resources, dynamic scaling with the ability to accommodate multiple users on a single piece of hardware.

IaaS benefits clients if their demand for infrastructure is not steady or if companies don’t have financial resources for scaling hardware. Regulatory compliance make the outsourcing of data storage and processing difficult for most users of IaaS. They are also disadvantaged if a company needs a high level of performance with its own infrastructure.

Do Check: Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing

Practical Use

One example of successful PaaS user is Menumate. They are an Australian point of sale as we as a  hardware and software provider. They use PaaS for their legacy applications. They were able to centralize and integrate a somewhat outdated in-house software toolkit by adopting PaaS. The service provided them non-functional requirements of significant infrastructure, connectivity and security so they could develop more functionality. They were also able to take advantage of existing integrations and automated deployment tools that PaaS offered them during the development process. Some of the legacy applications they migrated where licensure key generation, enhanced case management and label pricing. Using Paas development environment increased the speed of application creation. Without the service the process would have been costly.

Do Check: Cloud Computing Trends 2012

Live Smart is a producer of books and online diet programs. They operate the interactive online community Beyond Diet for their program users. In 2008, their site averaged visits of 300,000 viewers per day with spikes of up to 1,000,000 users a day. They needed an infrastructure that was low-touch and highly scalable to handle spikes. IaaS gave them the correct solutions for their marketing strategy. IaaS acts as their Linux and Windows administrator. They made changes as needed and responded to downtime. The service gives them the ability to focus on their core business. Their final decision to stay with the service has reduced the cost and increased flexibility compared to dedicated servers.

To sum up, control is the major difference between the two services. PaaS offers no control for the user with most implementation and control of applications handled through PaaS vendors. While Iaas users have total control but need a stronger technical team to handle the responsibilities of maintenance and security.

About the Author:

Victor is a blogger and tech enthusiast with plenty of experience in cloud computing and IT consulting.