Five Things to Consider Before Leaving a Development Project to PaaS

Platform-as-a-service provides many advantages for users over managing your own development infrastructure and allows you to spend more time focusing on design and coding. But PaaS might be the first choice for new projects, but PaaS may not be suitable for existing, legacy development efforts.

There are five things to consider before moving a legacy development project to PaaS.

How to use PaaS?

Different companies, PaaS play a different role to adapt to their IT environment and goals. First, you have to figure out how to incorporate PaaS into your organization. With some services, you can easily move your calculations to the cloud while keeping other features of your local resources. For example, the Pi Cloud provides an application interface (API) that copies your native Python code to the cloud and runs in the cloud, while your development tools and code repository can be kept locally.

Another way is to develop local resources and test PaaS products. This is useful when you run a large test suite or need a separate instance of a shared resource for testing. You can also develop the cloud by using the Cloud Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Features Supported Based on Browser IDEs - Some features are trivial and may not include all of the features you may have used to.

Do software development practices and tools match PaaS?

If you are developing software using tools like Git, SVN, Ant or Maven, think of how easy it is to use these tools with PaaS. PaaS version control system and local resources version control system, no different. However, the task of rewriting build scripts is especially important. If your usual practice is less formal, or use domestic tools, then consider how to adapt to the PaaS environment and review your code and document access control policies. Check your PaaS provider's access control mechanisms to make sure you have control over the access methods you need.

Need to integrate local resources?

Applications often need to integrate with other applications or shared resources, such as enterprise databases. In this case, you need to know how to access these PaaS resources. If you use an internal application that implements the Web Services API and serves external client applications, you can move to PaaS. If security is a concern, and only client applications for virtual private networks (VPNs) allow access to local resources, test the PaaS API as early as possible. If you need to implement VPN functionality and your PaaS provider can not meet your needs, consider replacing it with an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.

Development stack is fully supported?

PaaS has grown rapidly from a single-language platform to a platform that supports a range of languages, databases and other services. Find a PaaS that supports all your application stacks and reduces the barriers that PaaS uses. For example, if you develop in Java and use Jenkins for continuous integration, CloudBees might be a good choice. If you need to support Ruby and Node.js, consider Engine Yard. If you are building NoSQL platform, Red Hat's PaaS, OpenShift, may be a good choice.

What is the development stage?

Your place in the development process has a significant impact on the cost and benefits of moving local development to cloud development. Often, the more project gets late, the more investment in development environment and tools. As the project progresses, you need to create more software and have to move to the PaaS platform, which adds the cost of building a switch.

PaaS outweighs the cost and time it takes to complete the move and makes sense to move ongoing project development to the PaaS platform. After moving to PaaS, your management server, operating system and other infrastructure will be relieved. If you need to scale your application, the biggest reward is avoiding time-consuming and challenging engineering problems.

Running your app in the cloud saves you more time and money, and is worth a try for the move to PaaS.