On the present situation of PAAs and its future development prospects

With the development of the cloud computing industry in recent years, the platform as a service (Platform-as-a-service, PAAs) has also achieved a corresponding growth, but it still has been ignored by many analysts, companies and developers. A recent study shows that PAAs is about to get rid of the ugly Duckling's fate and will thrive in the coming years.

While the entire cloud computing industry is worth 109 billion dollars, PAAs can only account for around 1% of the total, according to research firm Gartner. By 2016, however, PAAs services could have reached $2.9 billion trillion or more than 2% of the total cloud computing industry.

More bullish than GARTNER,IDC on PAAs services, they think the service will grow at 30% a year in the next four years. Although the PAAs service is not large now, PAAs is the second fastest growing in the cloud computing field and should be of concern to the relevant sectors.

What is a PAAs

According to Gartner's classification, cloud computing is divided into four pieces: infrastructure as services, platforms as services, software as services and business processes as services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and BPaaS).

PAAs, between SaaS and IaaS, provides developers and companies with an environment for easier operation and deployment of application software. PAAs enables users to deploy and create cloud infrastructures to clients, or to use programming languages, libraries, and services.

Users do not need to manage and control the cloud infrastructure, including networks, servers, operating systems, or storage, but need to control the environment in which the upper-level application deployment and application are hosted. The PAAs, it says, eliminates the hassle of setting up, configuring, and eliminating the need for too much management of servers and databases.

The most compelling part of PAAs is that it not only improves the speed of developing applications, but also saves development costs. In addition, developers can focus more on application innovation and business. Currently the PAAs main service providers are Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine) and Microsoft (Azure).