Leveraging PaaS on Cloud for faster delivery

Every business owner today is keenly aware of the ticking clock when it comes to beating the competition and emerging successful in a hyper-competitive economy. Being fast, and first to launch a product in the market is often the deciding factor that determines which enterprise will win the lion’s share of the market.

Unfortunately, however, there are many stumbling blocks in the organisation’s path while trying to launch a software or application at the fastest possible speed. Traditional approaches to development lifecycles, as well as the constant tussle within IT and development teams to achieve more and better results, with as few resources as they can, create a dissonance between what is desirable and what is possible. Traditional approaches and a stingy approach while plotting resources invariably result in high costs, delayed or long development time, and missed business opportunities for businesses.

Cloud-based development platforms can go a long way in overcoming these challenges for enterprises. Organizations can achieve development of IT services faster and more efficiently by moving development of enterprise applications to the cloud by leveraging Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS). Doing this can help them reduce development costs, avoid complexity, and increase developer productivity. PaaS can so effectively stream IT processes by eliminating some of the biggest challenges of the traditional approaches such as:

Removing core infrastructure obstacles

Software development traditionally relies on IT to set up development environments at the start of every new project — a process that can stretch for weeks or months. The IT teams are usually under great pressure to set up and maintain hardware infrastructure for development. The work itself is time and money-consuming.

In addition to this, the utilisation of computing resources oscillates greatly between high and low utilisation periods during the software development process. Since clouds provide access to a shared pool of resources, higher resource utilisation is possible at lower costs. Clouds also make it possible for developers and QA engineers to provision and de-provision the resources they need to perform their work effectively on their own with the help of automations. This gives them much faster access to computing resources, greatly decreasing the time cost, as well the financial cost of IT support.

Cloud services address both cost and speed issues within application testing and development. Since organisations don’t need to buy hardware individually, their CAPEX cost is significantly lowered. At the same time, their OPEX costs are lowered because they no longer need to spend on managing servers, equipment, etc. Additionally, most cloud services offer pay-as-you-go packages that allow businesses to scale up or cut back depending on their individual requirements.

Going beyond basic infrastructure

In addition to the basic infrastructure needs, application development usually requires complex application platforms that may require a great deal of effort and cost to maintain. Businesses may still be forced to depend heavily on IT staff to install, configure, and maintain database and middleware software on top of the infrastructure layer to enable application development and the deployment of environments. PaaS can provide cloud-based platforms for developing and deploying applications without the cost and complexity of managing the underlying middleware, database software, and infrastructure hardware. By using PaaS, businesses are then able to develop new applications and seize emerging business opportunities in a cost and time-effective manner. PaaS also makes it easier for teams stationed in different geographies to collaborate and develop more effectively.

To sum it up, PaaS offers pooled, shared and scalable platforms for development of all kinds of applications, while also providing standardisation on a common middleware and database platform. This gives organisations the added benefit of integration and portability, should they need it in the future. Development of new applications is faster because developers are already conversant with the standardised technologies and don’t have to spend time learning new ones. Therefore, PaaS enables businesses to spend more time innovating, while spending the least resources on setting up and managing environments.