Before Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), there was Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). And before SaaS, mobile app development around the world relied on On-Premise resources for their mobile app development needs.
On-Premise, the resources needed to build mobile apps were housed in the same buildings as the individuals in the IT teams which proved difficult due to space constraints, financial constraints, and licensing constraints – to name a few.
PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) make up the different layers of Cloud Computing; their differences lie in the delivery models they come with.
SaaS was the next port of call for mobile app developers as a software delivery model over the internet but as the need for more capabilities arose, PaaS was called on; oftentimes, IaaS has been called on too.
Today, PaaS is a more popular model than SaaS. Over one-third of businesses that have adopted cloud computing for their business processes lean towards the PaaS structure rather than SaaS or IaaS.
Cloud computing has numerous advantages and benefits for businesses in any sector or industry.
PaaS vs SaaS
In recent years, IT teams have shifted from SaaS to PaaS in order to reduce costs, and save time and resources in doing the work they were hired to do. One of the ways PaaS is better than SaaS is in its deployment of required tools – from data centers independent of the location of these IT teams – with greater efficiency and unlimited access to bandwidth. The advantages of PaaS over SaaS are not limited to the aforementioned ones but extend to:
- More features (which essentially means more benefits).
- Reduction in budget size and allocation.
- Better launch time.
- Ease in scaling mobile applications.
Mobile PaaS
PaaS is often employed for mobile app development. With the way new smart devices are being built on different OSs, as much as half a dozen, mobile app development needs lots of heavy lifting to be done without sharing the attention paid to the core process itself. This is where PaaS comes in, by doing that heavy lifting.
Providing Arrays of Tools for Development
PaaS is host to a variety of languages, user interfaces, and frameworks that mobile application development companies can choose, install, and work with to build and maintain fully built apps or work-in-progress apps on the cloud.
Python, Node.js, C#, Java are some of the languages that can be preinstalled.
Provides a Trusted IDE
PaaS serves as a trusted Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Building, debugging, testing and launching can easily be done with PaaS, helping save the time usually spent on cross-switching from one environment to the other to ensure that apps are okay before being released on an App store.
This IDE also provides a leeway for trying out new ideas or new processes for mobile apps in development.
Mobile App Security
One of the worries of businesses is how security can be framed not just against cyber threats on the web but for mobile apps as well. The persistent question is how can security policies for the mobile app ecosystem be fused into the beautiful looking app?
PaaS answers this with centralized authentication processes, access rights definition, privilege granting, single sign-on capacity and data encryption for when data is in use or at rest. With past data security, PaaS provides backup and recovery for present data and lost data respectively.
PAYG Model
PaaS’s operation as a pay-as-you-go model is a great offering that ensures that mobile app developers are not burdened with server requirements or licenses, storage space, hosting requirements or needs like data management capacity, licenses, and other aspects of the entire mobile app development cycle that take away from the core process.
With Pay as You Go, mobile app developers can easily increase server capacity, server speed, how much space is required because of a new feature or update, and how much data storage capacity is needed.
2020 is the best time to embrace PaaS over SaaS or IaaS not just because of its flexibility but because of the many advantages it offers over SaaS or on-premise applications for mobile applications.
