Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a [web hosting] platform that allows customers to deploy, run, and manage applications without dealing with the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. Servers, storage, and networking are all operated by the PaaS provider, allowing developers to focus on writing code and building applications. PaaS is one form of managed hosting, where the provider operates the platform and the customer supplies only the application.

Some PaaS systems feature integrated development environments (IDEs) and other tools to support management of the complete development and operations lifecycle.

Examples of PaaS include:

• Microsoft Azure App Service
• Google App Engine
• Heroku.

Serverless computing is a type of PaaS that abstracts the underlying infrastructure even further, such that even scaling and resource allocation are fully managed by the cloud service provider.

An internal platform built by a platform engineering team is the private analogue of a PaaS: the same self-service abstraction, but a single tenant, shaped to one organization’s standards and changeable to meet its needs.