Understanding PaaS

Defining a SaaS service is easy. If everything is managed by AWS, it's a SaaS service. The same applies to a definition of an on-premises service. If you are managing everything on your infrastructure, it's clear you have an on-premises service. As you start going up and down the stack and start taking over the management of some of the components or start offloading some of the management, the line starts getting fuzzy. We'll still try to provide you with a definition for PaaS.

An initial definition could be this: any application where you are responsible for the maintenance of some of the software and some of the configuration data. More formally, Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a type of cloud computing service that supplies an environment to enable its users to develop, run, and manage data and applications without worrying about the complexity associated with provisioning, configuring, and maintaining the infrastructure normally required to...