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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Platform as a Service

Web applications are built by programmers. Programmers do one thing really

well: they program. The problem for programmers is that a Web application

needs a lot more than just a programmer. Developing a Web application

requires people to manage the infrastructure: system administrators, database

administrators, general network support, and so on. A Web application also

needs more than just hardware and an operating system. It needs

development tools, monitoring tools, database tools, and potentially hundreds

of other tools and services. Getting a Web application up and running is a big

job.

A Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider gives programmers all the tools

they need to deploy, administer, and maintain a Web application. The PaaS

provider starts with some form of infrastructure, which could be provided by

an IaaS, and on top of that infrastructure the provider builds a platform: a

complete deployment and management system to handle every aspect of a

Web application.

The important point of PaaS is that the infrastructure underneath the PaaS

is largely invisible to the developer. The PaaS provider is aware of their

infrastructure, but the developer cannot control it directly, and doesn’t need

to think about its complexity. As far as the programmer is concerned, the

PaaS is just a place to deploy and run his or her application.

Heroku, one of the earliest PaaS providers, creates a simple interface on

top of the IaaS offerings of AWS, further reducing the complexity of

developing and scaling Web applications. Heroku’s management console (see

Figure 22-31) enables developers to increase or decrease the capacity of an

application with a single slider, or easily set up add-ons that add a database,

monitor logs, track performance, and more. It could take days for a tech or

developer unfamiliar with the software and services to install, configure, and

integrate a set of these services with a running application; PaaS providers

help cut this down to minutes or hours.

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