Platform as a Service Offerings

While IaaS solutions are extremely powerful, they generally should not be the first choice. Virtual machines require a lot of maintenance, such as patching, protection, resiliency planning, and a lot more. For custom applications, organizations should first look at the Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, as these enable the focus to be the application and not maintaining all the OS components that you really don’t care about as an organization. Azure’s initial offering was PaaS, and IaaS was added later. While the focus of this book is IaaS, I want to cover the basics around the key PaaS services available.

Note that I am not covering all services. There are many, including Azure Batch, which is a massive scale job scheduling service, and then messaging building blocks such as Event Hub, Event Grid, and Service Bus. I am going to focus on what I see as some of the core PaaS compute services that are the focus for many architectures today...