Page 43 - Banking Finance March 2023

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to build and maintain your application development Because PaaS delivers all standard development tools
platform-and no need for development teams to wait through the GUI online interface, developers can log in from
while you do this. You simply tap into the cloud service anywhere to collaborate on projects, test new applications,
provider's PaaS to begin provisioning resources and or roll out completed products. Applications are designed
developing immediately. and developed right in the PaaS using middleware. With
streamlined workflows, multiple development and
Affordable access to a wider variety of resources. PaaS
platforms typically offer access to a wider range of operations teams can work on the same project
choices up and down the application stack- including simultaneously.
operating systems, middleware, databases and
development tools-than most organizations can PaaS providers manage the bulk of cloud computing services,
such as servers, runtime and virtualization. As a PaaS
practically or affordably maintain themselves.
customer, company maintains management of applications
More freedom to experiment, with less risk. PaaS also
and data.
lets you try or test new operating systems, languages
and other tools without having to make substantial
Use cases for PaaS
investments in them, or in the infrastructure required
to run them. By providing an integrated and ready-to-use platform-and
by enabling organizations to offload infrastructure
Easy, cost-effective scalability. With an on-premises
management to the cloud provider and focus on building,
platform, scaling is always expensive, often wasteful and
deploying and managing applications-PaaS can ease or
sometimes inadequate: You have to purchase additional
advance a number of IT initiatives, including:
compute, storage and networking capacity in
API development and management: Because of its
anticipation of traffic spikes; much of that capacity sits
built-in frameworks, PaaS makes it much simpler for
idle during low-traffic periods, and none of it can be
teams to develop, run, manage and secure APIs
increased in time to accommodate unanticipated
(application programming interfaces) for sharing data
surges. With PaaS, you can purchase additional capacity,
and functionality between applications.
and start using it immediately, whenever you need it.
Greater flexibility for development teams. PaaS Internet of Things (IoT): Out of the box, PaaS can
services provide a shared software development support a range of programming languages (Java,
environment that allows development and operations Python, Swift, etc.), tools and application environments
teams access to all the tools they need, from any used for IoT application development and real-time
location with an internet connection. processing of data generated by IoT devices.
Lower costs overall. Clearly PaaS reduces costs by Agile development and DevOps: PaaS can provide
enabling an organization to avoid capital equipment fully-configured environments for automating the
expense associated with building and scaling an software application lifecycle including integration,
application platform. But PaaS also can also reduce or delivery, security, testing and deployment.
eliminate software licensing costs. And by handling
Cloud migration and cloud-native development: With
patches, updates and other administrative tasks, PaaS
its ready-to-use tools and integration capabilities, PaaS
can reduce your overall application management costs.
can simplify migration of existing applications to the
cloud-particularly via replatforming (moving an
How PaaS works
application to the cloud with modifications that take
In general, PaaS solutions have three main parts: better advantage of cloud scalability, load balancing and
Cloud infrastructure including virtual machines (VMs), other capabilities) or refactoring (re-architecting some
operating system software, storage, networking, or all of an application using microservices, containers
firewalls and other cloud-native technologies).
Software for building, deploying and managing Hybrid cloud strategy: Hybrid cloud integrates public
applications cloud services, private cloud services and on-premises
infrastructure and provides orchestration, management
A graphic user interface, or GUI, where development
or DevOps teams can do all their work throughout the and application portability across all three. The result
is a unified and flexible distributed computing
entire application lifecycle

38 | 2023 | MARCH | BANKING FINANCE