PaaS for development: Doubling down on expertise

Companies with a heavy application development component, whether they are independent software vendors (ISVs) or simply businesses that deploy prominent internal software, have much to gain from adopting Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). One of the primary benefits of this change is the removal of hands-on dealings with the hardware elements of the infrastructure and a related re-focusing on core software development competencies.

Focus on what's important

When a business seeks out highly qualified IT personnel, it's understood that the professionals will be most valuable if they are assigned to value-adding projects, application development primary among them. If these employees have to deal with the problems of infrastructure management, that takes them away from the task at hand. This may be especially tough for businesses that are growing rapidly but still using legacy development platforms. There is a need to add new resources in a hurry, and for employees to work on these projects - but every worker diverted to the expansion is one fewer professional actually developing apps.

The scalability inherent to the cloud and its hands-off nature are major factors in favor of PaaS use. Instead of committing employees and resources to managing and adding new hardware and keeping infrastructure in line, all of those technical aspects are managed by third-party providers. Organizations gain the capabilities they need without building them out, and if an app deployment project requires far more power than was anticipated, it's easy to make the necessary additions.

Budgetary improvements are another part of the PaaS experience. Instead of buying new hardware, wherein power is conveyed in inflexible chunks with large capital expenditures, using PaaS through the public cloud is a reasonable and predictable operating expense, and it can be altered to add more resources on demand and scaled out to suit end-user or client needs. In addition to keeping the staff highly focused, PaaS can ensure IT budgets stay reasonable.

Operational improvements

The PaaS model isn't just easier and more economical to use - there are also everyday benefits to picking this technology, ones that developers can use to make up ground in their respective industries. For instance, it's far easier to keep up fast release cycles with PaaS than conventional tools, as PaaS enables constant access to the code by a variety of different employees. Hand-offs between teams are now more efficient than ever, with testing and quality assurance moving alongside coding instead of serving as a separate and time-consuming step in the process. PaaS makes this speed a natural development feature.