Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Nikhil Mulgir, Mihir Kulkarni, Soham Navandar

Abstract — In modern era Cloud Computing is major
hi-tech research area in latest technology. In the
present time cloud computing technology have been
developed to achieve better performance, Computing
architecture and nature of access changed drastically
the format of service-delivery model. Cloud offers
services for computing on single mouse click. Cloud
Computing is a broad word that describes a broad range
of services such as Accessibility, Availability,
Movability, Scalability, Flexibility, Reliability and Cap-
Ex Free of computing resources on service-based
economic model. Since the Cloud is a broad collection
of services, user/client can choose where, when, and
how they use Cloud Computing. The key utility of Cloud
Computing is that here the client could take services on
demand and pay per use. Cloud Computing contains of
Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Keywords — PaaS; IaaS, SaaS, Containers, Virtual
Machines, Hybrid PaaS
INTRODUCTION
In traditional computing system, software, applications, and
data are typically installed and stored in local physical
computer or local computing environment. Whereas, in a
cloud computing environment, individuals and businesses
work with applications and data stored and/or maintained on
shared machines in a web-based environment rather than
physically located in the home of a user or a corporate
environment. More than decades of research on
computational performance in traditional Information
Technology (IT), the focus is now concept of PaaS in cloud
environment clear to the user, so that they can analyze that
cloud is a most important technology when it comes to
Platform as a service and that it is capable of handling small
and big Organization, Academia, Institute and Industrial
project as well. So that each and everything shifted towards
the computation resource as a service on-demand, over the
internet, pay-on-usage. Availability is the vital metric for
these resources; near 100% availability is becoming
mandatory for both intensive users and service providers.

Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing has been emerged as a new service
centric technology. Offers service on-demand, elastic
provisioning, reliability, security and pay-per-uses economic
model. Cloud Computing is basically an internet architecture
that provides service from anywhere and at any time. Cloud
Computing environment provides internet-based platform
which are used for computer technology. Over the past few
years, the concept of cloud computing and virtualization has
gained much momentum and has become a more popular
phrase in information technology. Many organizations have
started implementing these new technologies to further
reduce costs through improved machine utilization, reduced
administration time and infrastructure costs. Cloud
computing is the environment that enables customers to use
applications on the Internet such as storing and protecting
data while providing a service. It describes a variety of
computing concepts. Cloud becomes the new wrapped
around the new technology. Cloud Computing collects all
the computing resources and manages them automatically.
Today World relies on Cloud computing to store their public
as well as personal information. Today World relies on
Cloud computing to store their public as well as personal
information. Cloud computing becomes the requirement for
every user and provide relevant hardware, software, and
service according to the need that users put forward. With
the rapid development of the Internet, user’s requirement is
realized through the Internet, different from changing with
the need. In fact, cloud computing is an ex-tend of grid
computing, distributed computing, and parallel computing.
Its foreground is to provide secure, quick, convenient data
storage and net computing service centered. Many
organizations that could be consider as the giant of software
industry like Microsoft are joining to develop Cloud
services. Cloud Computing having secure access to all the
application and data from any network devices.
 server or in the software licensing, also here the costs are
small. End User can easily scale up or down the services,
Platform-as-a-Service limiting them according to their requirements. There are
many data centers that are located at multiple locations for
Platform as a service is a virtualized platform that the storage of data from near locations. The user has no need
comprises one or more servers (virtualized over the set of to organize or own the resources. Service providers can
physical servers), operating systems, and specific select the location for infrastructure freely, according to their
applications (such as Apache and MySQL for Web-based requirements, minimizing their overhead expenses. Cloud
applications). It comprises a layer of software and provides computing services can be used and accessed from any
it as a service that can be used to build higher-level services. device such as computer, mobile phone, or iPhone.
Platform as a Service, often simply referred to as PaaS, is a
type of cloud computing that provides an environment and
platform to permit developers to figure applications and
services over the internet. PaaS services are hosted in the
cloud and accessed by users simply via their web browser.
PaaS services are normally paid for on a payment basis with
clients finally paying just for what they use. Previously
without cloud, Developer where used individually platform
and different software for different platform. This used a
huge amount of memory, time, and money wastage. There
were some terms and condition that were to be followed by a
hardware component which was in-need to follow the
software installation requirements Also if configuration if in
case not satisfied by hardware according to software it may
not get installed on it. And many more issues where there
that must be solved. So that PaaS solved the problem by
using cloud as its working condition. Platform is considered
as one of the basic needs for any developer. It allows the
developer to use a platform on demand and on pay-per-use Advantages of PaaS
basis. This eliminates the need to purchase platform for our
own PC or system.
PaaS works well for small businesses and start-up
companies for two very basic reasons. First, it is cost
effective, allowing smaller organizations access to state-of-
the-art resources without the big price tag. Most small firms
have never been able to build robust development
environments on premises, so PaaS provides a path for
accelerating software development. Second, it allows
companies to focus on what they specialize in without
worrying about maintaining basic infrastructure.

1) Cost Saving

When the company uses PaaS, most of the workflow such as

Basic Feature
A. Basic Feature The elementary feature of cloud
computing is that it increases the facilities, functionalities,
and add abilities, without any need of spending in novel
design, training new classifieds or licensing new software. It
is totally based on pay-peruse concept. In software as
service(using cloud computing), the clients are benefited as
many clients can access the same application, through the
browser it also means that there is no investment in the
system hosting and data storage is transferred to the cloud
and in-house devices are no longer needed.
The business will only pay for the resources that will be
used, that is, the subscription to the services has a price that
changes according to the demand for technology.
In addition, there is no need to direct a large team to monitor
and perform equipment maintenance. These processes are
directed at the service provider, which improves the
company’s focus on strategic routines.
 2) Availability & Mobility
Professionals involved in the tasks of development, testing,
maintenance, delivery and support can collaborate without
losing sync, even if they are in different locations.
PaaS makes it possible to centralize team communication in
a single environment, forming a unified communication
structure. This can help solve problems faster and bring
agility to the company’s activities.
Like any cloud-based service, a good pass is available at all
times, anywhere, including allowing multiple developers to
work on one code at the same time.
3) Facilitates Scalability
Platform as a service can be seen as a great scalability
solution, as it delivers an environment with highly scalable
spaces, tools, and resources.
In fact, the structure is resilient, allowing the business to
grow sustainably or meet peak seasonal demands; all this
while being flexible in structure.
All this is carried out in an automated way and you need to
only pay for what you use. This is the best way to grow
without the need for high investments.
4) Boosts Productivity
PaaS allows you to develop and implement new applications
without the need to spend time creating your own work
environment. This can speed up the application
development, testing, and delivery cycle.
Instead of starting from scratch in each project, standardized
resources make it easier to maintain routines and techniques.
Disadvantages of PaaS
1) Boosts Productivity
One of the biggest drawbacks of PaaS is that the user is
highly dependent on the vendor’s infrastructure and
software. Consequently, it may find itself linked to a
particular seller without the possibility of changing it.
In addition, any breakdowns or changes in a supplier’s
development roadmap can compromise users’ projects. If a
provider ceases to support a particular programming
language, users will also be forced to change their language
or to use another provider.
2) Data Security
By putting its entire structure on a cloud, the company ends
up releasing private data and information, things that can be
sensitive and confidential.
It ends up becoming the function of the cloud manager to
protect and take care of the data, so the trust in the provider
is something that is very critical.
The existence of a company can be put at risk, so all other
possibilities must be analysed before making a decision.
Types of PaaS
Public PaaS
Public PaaS solutions are best used in the public cloud and
allow users to control app deployment while the vendor
delivers and manages all major infrastructure components,
including servers, operating systems (OS), databases,
storage, etc. 
An interesting characteristic of public PaaS is how PaaS and CPaaS to include software development kits( SDK) and
IaaS run together. Public PaaS vendors provide middleware libraries to assist developers build apps on desktop, as well
that allows users to configure and manage resources—like, as mobile platforms. 
servers and databases—without having to set up the required
infrastructure. So, PaaS is using the public cloud and runs on
top of the vendor’s IaaS.  Mobile PaaS

The downside of this is that public PaaS users are locked in
when it comes to the public cloud provider their PaaS
vendor is using. This is one of the main reasons why big
enterprises are reluctant to adopt a public PaaS solution.
Mobile PaaS—or MPaaS—is the simplest of the types of
PaaSwe’ve seen so far since it does not require any coding
skills. Mobile PaaS users utilize a paid integrated
development environment (IDE) in order to configure
mobile apps. MPaaS solutions also offer a drag-and-drop
interface that significantly simplifies the development of
HTML5 or native apps. 

Private PaaS The use of mobile PaaS solutions can be very cost-effective
as it eliminates the need for in-house mobile app developers
and dedicated IT support. 
Private PaaS solutions are best used—yes, you guessed it—
in the private cloud. Private PaaS vendors put the emphasis
on security and compliance, keeping the agility benefits of
the public PaaS. Private PaaS runs on any infrastructure and
works within the user’s private cloud. 

Private PaaS vendors deliver their solution as software

within the user’s firewall which is most commonly managed
on their on-prem infrastructure. Putting the emphasis on
security, private PaaS solutions allow developers to build,
deploy, and manage their applications while also staying
compliant with security and privacy requirements.
Open PaaS

Hybrid PaaS
Open PaaS solutions are open source and can run on all
devices. Open PaaS provides web apps for business-oriented
Hybrid PaaS solutions run in a hybrid cloud and are highly collaboration—for example, calendars and mail apps—and
flexible as they combine the benefits of public and private works best for applications using the hybrid cloud. 
PaaS, and offer the ability to own internal infrastructure in
private PaaS.

Communication PaaS

Communication PaaS solutions—or CPaaS—are cloud-

based platforms that allow users to add real-time
communication features to their applications. As a rule, real-
time communications are added using backend infrastructure
and interfaces, since these features are normally seen in apps
that are built for communication purposes, in particular—for
example, messaging and video calling applications. 

CPaaS makes the difference by providing users with an all-

in-one development environment to build real-time
communication features for their apps. It is also common for

Examples of PaaS
Amazon AWS PaaS Amazon
It is presently considered as the biggest cloud service
provider. Amazon Web Services emerged primarily as an
IaaS, however, in last few years company also stepped-in in
the PaaS through its AWS platform. AWS allows to utilize
platform services and capabilities without maintaining or
creating own application servers. AWS offers support to a
large number of languages like Python, Java, Perl, Ruby and
other languages. MySQL, Oracle and SQL Server can be
deployed and managed. The Amazon’ RDS web services
allows to eliminate database administration issues. AWS
offer other services like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk for auto-
scaling, application health monitoring and automatic load
balancing, which are so much supportive and helpful for
application developers.
Strengths: As AWS is mainly an IaaS technology provider,
so virtually, there is no limit to the databases, languages or
server side technologies. We can have capabilities to install
and run any of them.
Weaknesses: As compared to other PaaS options, AWS
platform requires more management overhead which leads
to more time consumption tasks. Opportunities: AWS's Free
Usage Tier allows new users to have free of cost 30GB data
space, 750 hours and 15GB bandwidth.
Threats: Cloud “Locked-in” situation. Also it is very
expensive for basic offers. Pricing Strategy: A Monthly
calculator is available to calculate the charges for application
services, storage and data charges. However, the overall
structure is pretty complex.
Google App Engine
Google App Engine is one of the major market stakeholders
in PaaS services. It is designed for developers who program
in languages like Python, Java, Go and PHP for developing
distributed web applications. Google App Engine has Java
based environment that supports other languages using Java
Runtime Environment (JRE). It also has a software
development kit (SDK) for each of four main supported
languages and Eclipse plug-in. According to Ciurana , GAE
PaaS supports runtime environment and managing
infrastructure that is ensured to scale up and down, however,
if the applications conform to the standards of Google App
Engine. It also offers schema-less data-store that deals with
the complex management of data which is available for
several machine instances.
Strengths: Sandbox model allows Google App Engine for
isolating the processes from each other. In this way, a risk of
process disruption has been 11 reduced (e.g. a rogue process
on a physical server, disrupt other process’s operations on
that server).
Weaknesses: Google App Engine only offers a limited
number of programming languages support (Java, Python,
Go and PHP). Opportunities: For new users it provides free
first 28 instance hours, cloud storage of 5GB is free, 1 GB
outgoing and incoming traffic is also free .
Threats: GAE has problem of cloud locked -in. Pricing:
Google App Engine is using the pricing model of pay per
use. It charges $0.05/ hour fee for reserved instance or
$0.08/hour on demand instance. Cloud Storage service is
also available at $0.026/GB/month. The Data-store cost
$0.06/100k read/ write operations. While small operations
are free. Outgoing Network Traffic (Bandwidth) costs
$0.12/GB.
Future Prospects: In this IT based age information is power.
In case of “Big data” Google has no competitors. In machine
learning and data mining field, Google is recognized as one
of the top companies in the world. There are huge chances in
future that Google Cloud Platform and its services will
mostly be dedicated for the Big Data industry (BigQuery).
Google Compute Engine could be the biggest competitor of
AWS during 2015 and in coming years. Google has
successfully managed and enhanced its cloud infrastructure
since last 10 years. Since 2008, Google App Engine has
improved up to a great extent. Google is taking full
advantage of its global and comprehensive network as
compared to AWS.

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Widows Azure was first released on Feb 1, 2010.
In 2014, it was named Microsoft Azure. According to
Gartner, Microsoft Azure is one of the major cloud
platforms and ranked as a leader in both IaaS and PaaS cloud
industry. Now lines blurring between PaaS and IaaS
technology of Microsoft. Azure Cloud facilitates languages
such as Node.js, .NET, Python, PHP, Ruby and Java.
Developers are able to make use of Visual Studio for
developing and deploying applications. Also developers
have the choice of selecting among SQL Database, Tables
and Blobs when persistent storage is required. Microsoft
Azure’ born applications is administered by its dashboard or
by using a command line interface.
Strengths: Microsoft Azure is offering PaaS and IaaS in one
package. Azure facilitates a quick scale up or down
according to the changing needs of business.
Weaknesses: One of the key aspects that seem to be
bottleneck for Azure is its minimalist administration control
portal. Opportunities: MS Azure offers a free 30-day trial
version for new users. This version has a limit of up to $200.
Threats: Higher self-hosting and integration costs. Pricing:
Azure pricing is based on the size of instances running. Price
ranges from $0.02/hr. to $0.64/hr. Also outbound data
transfers start from the $0.087 per GB. SQL database
services start from the $4.99/month. Virtual Machine starts
from $13/month.
Future Prospects: Microsoft Azure turned out to be a major
market competitor with Google and AWS in recent years. To
get its distinguishing market position, Microsoft Azure
introduced a number of innovative and enhanced services,
however, the future lies to technology providers who offer
innovation.
Salesforce.com & Heroku
Salesforce.com is a key PaaS service provider. Currently it is
offering PaaS services through Force.com and
Salesforce1.com. Force.com has established standard for
developing new age multitenant cloud applications.
Force.com offered PaaS infrastructure to developers to
develop and deploy the application on Salesforce's servers.
Salesforce.com PaaS platform offers support for
programming languages and frameworks like Java, Apex,
Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Python, all JVM languages and
more. Such extensive support offer developers to develop all
kinds of rich and effective applications that please
customers.
Heroku
Heroku is one of the initial cloud platforms, founded in
2007. Salesforce.com has acquired company in 2010; though
it is still working as a subsidiary cloud service. It supports
languages and frameworks like Python, Ruby, Scala, Java,
Node.js and Cloture. It is based on the abstract computing
infrastructure known as dynos, which run processes in an
isolated environment, based on virtualized Unix-style
containers. Heroku perform very efficiently with apps that
support Twelve-Factor-App methodology. Heroku is now
becoming more and more mature PaaS platform with
numerous better capabilities (support third party apps e.g.
Add-ons). In future, it will become a major market
shareholder of PaaS.
Strengths: Salesforce.com PaaS offers a preintegrated
capability that already has a search database, business
intelligence reports and security/identity etc. Business
services also manage upgrades and automatically back-up of
user data.
Weaknesses: Salesforce.com PaaS services charge very high
recurring subscription costs as compared to other market
competitors. Opportunities: The initial pricing package of
Salesforce.com PaaS offers powerful applications with
access to ten custom objects/users.
Threats: Data centre’s reliability is questionable due to a
number of significant outages. Pricing: Salesforce.com PaaS
pricing is based on monthly basis. The starting cost is
$25/user/month. Pricing is billed on annual basis.
 Conclusion

Now a day Cloud Computing is becoming back bone of

any organization. It deals with our Daily life. It becomes
most popular for every end user can enjoy highly
demanded services provided such as PaaS, IaaS and SaaS
by cloud. End user can share cloud services anywhere,
anytime with any device. The data in cloud is never lost,
making it good for future reference. Using PaaS, IaaS and
SaaS, the business could be done without any tenants or
technological limitations. All platform, infrastructure and
software are available on cloud therefore end user no need
to install operating system and software on their personal
systems.
The researchers still have more work to do; we hope
this paper will be considered as a starting point identifying
opportunities for future research. Cloud computing is
based on the demand access to virtualized IT resources
that are housed outside of your range , while you can
share it with different services however use it easily in
addition you can subscribe for this service with an
inexpensive monthly fees, and navigate the web smoothly
that has many features.

REFERENCES
[1] https://www.toolbox.com/tech/cloud/articles/what-is-
platform-as-a-service/

[2] https://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/
definition/Platform-as-a-Service-PaaS

[3] https://www.comptia.org/content/articles/what-is-paas

[4] https://blog.equinix.com/blog/2015/12/21/top-cloud-
paas-use-cases/

[5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
258255287_PaaS_Cloud