Platform as a Service, or PaaS, can be extremely helpful to you when it comes to developing and maintaining your applications. The question is – when should you consider using PaaS for your apps?
As your company grows, the usefulness of PaaS will also grow, as it can save you quite a bit of time on things like maintenance and consistency of your architecture. Taking a look at the primary advantages of using PaaS is a helpful way to decide if your company is ready to make the move now.
Setting up servers on the cloud is simple, you simply provision them as needed. Rather than worrying about buying servers and trying to integrate the new physical server into your infrastructure, you can simply provision a new server using PaaS. This leaves the hardware worries to the PaaS provider, allowing you to concentrate on configuration and management of the new server.
While the physical setup pains are eliminated, you still get to configure and maintain the servers the way you need to, allowing you the control needed to develop your applications with the necessary tools in place.
The difference between vertical and horizontal scaling.
When you are purchasing the servers on your own, you have to consider this more closely, as you will need the infrastructure to handle any scaling that needs to happen as your application and number of users grows. Whether you choose a vertical or horizontal scalingstrategy, this can be expensive and requires additional setup time to implement.
On the other hand, if you use a PaaS solution, you can simply scale as needed, without worrying about possibly setting up or purchasing additional hardware. PaaS can provide a good cost savings here, as scaling can be done automatically with many PaaS services.
This allows you to pay as needed for scaling, rather than providing resources before they are necessary. Another advantage is that you again do not need to set up additional hardware on your end, saving you and your staff of setup time.
With PaaS, your maintenance time can be decreased dramatically, as you do not need to keep as much physical hardware maintained. Instead, the PaaS provider keeps things in working order while you work on configuring and developing your applications.
In the end, switching to PaaS is a good idea when you get to the point that setup, scaling, maintenance, or all three become too costly or time-consuming for your company. If resources are thin, PaaS can be an extremely helpful solution to keep things moving forward while the demand for your services increases.
Looking for a good PaaS service to run your apps? Why not try out Morpheus, which makes provisioning, scaling, and maintenance a breeze. You can provision databases, servers quickly, and have your app up and running in no time! Using the available tools, you can also monitor the various parts of your system to keep track of uptime, response time, and to be alerted if an issue does arise.
The Morpheus interface is clean and easy to use. Source: Morpheus.
Morpheus allows you to provision apps in a single click, and provides ease of use for developers with APIs and a CLI. In addition, backups are also automatic, and you can have redundancy as needed to avoid potentially long waits for disaster recovery to take place. To grab a demo click here.
