Today, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is increasingly gaining popularity as a Public Cloud offering compared to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) because of its simple operations and lower costs. These days, most PaaS customers get locked-in because of the specialized OS or middleware features but for the customers looking for flexibility in working across multiple Cloud platforms and providers, a portable PaaS environment is a feasible choice.
Before we see how organizations can implement a portable PaaS model, let’s first see the primary reasons behind the adoption of PaaS services:
- Lesser costs of licensing and supporting because of the pre-installed OS and middleware.
- Streamlined Hybrid Cloud deployment with standardized application services.
- Improved application performance and functionality by creating a PaaS environment within the IaaS Cloud using the available web services.
How a portable PaaS model fairs across these three areas and how it moves within the various cloud and private environments is important but a single PaaS approach might not be enough to address this. Thus, enterprises need to prioritize their PaaS goals and combine different options to create the desired PaaS environment.
Here are the top 4 ways to achieve a Portable PaaS model:
Adopt Container Technology for Application Hosting: The container architectures share the Operating System, but the middleware and file system elements can be copied to each container to standardize the middleware across container images. This allows the creation of specialized container images for the application and the component which can then be moved across environments to be run on any container system hosted in Cloud or the Data Center. Read more