Platform as a Service (PAAS)

First and foremost, using a PaaS to deploy and run your application enhances your agility.

Focusing development resources and spending less headcount on unneeded expertise are both benefits that intuitively translate into reducing costs.

Eliminating much of the overhead to deploy and manage applications doesn’t just mean you can do certain things faster. It means you don’t have to do certain things at all. Which means that you don’t even need to know how to do them. Which allows you to be even better at knowing how to do the things that differentiate your business, like building applications with innovative features and exceptional user experiences.

A particular challenge of deploying your application on a self-built stack is the sheer number of components that need to be tracked, maintained, updated, and re-integrated over time. With PaaS, you not only get the best possible stack as of the moment you deploy, you also get a stack that keeps up with you over time, ensuring that your application is always running on the latest and greatest.

The benefit of economies of scale doesn’t simply stop at getting the same thing for less money. What you actually end up with is something better, for less money. The stack and platform-level technology you would build yourself will almost never be as good as what a top PaaS will provide.

Security showcases another distinct advantage of the PaaS model. With the sheer volume and the diversity of security threats on an upward spiral, protecting against attacks is best left to specialists. A PaaS offering provides continual security updates for individual stack components as they are issued.

It’s one thing to get the best technology at the best cost for a given size of business. It’s another thing to achieve that at many different sizes—potentially spanning orders of magnitude—as your business grows.

An interesting behavior happens in real-world enterprises when departments or lines of business can’t get corporate approval or fast enough turnaround to build and deploy a new Web application; they tend to do it anyway.

PaaS offerings can help you achieve your availability goals and give you innovative new disaster recovery/ business continuity options.

As outlined above, when you build and run on a PaaS, you use technology that has been developed and refined in response to the needs of thousands of customers. But it’s not just the technology that embodies that aggregated expertise. It’s the people themselves. When you call for Unbox Data Centers Support, you speak to someone who has dealt with hundreds of problems in the same domain as yours. You speak to someone who has access to—may even be sitting next to—some of the leading experts in the community, whether for core Ruby or PHP language stack components or complementary open source projects.