IaaS is a really useful and fundamental part of cloud computing, but that is not the only choice. It’s also possible to build and run applications using an approach called PaaS, Platform as a Service. In this technology, applications are still running in VMs, but the developer who writes those applications doesn’t see the VMs. Instead, they are running the application on a set of supporting services. Those services can vary quite a bit, but across all PaaS technologies for compute, this service makes it easier and faster to build and run applications on cloud platforms. It also can make it cheaper to run these applications because PaaS lowers the amount of management work required. The PaaS services also take care of a lot of the housekeeping for you. PaaS is designed mostly for brand-new applications and can be a great choice.
Containers
For quite a while, IaaS and PaaS were pretty much of the cloud platform compute. Today though, there are more options. There is what is sometimes known as Containers as a Service. The idea is that rather than working at the virtual machine level, you instead can deploy and manage containers that run inside VMs then have your applications run inside those containers. A container management service can decide where your containers should run and can manage them as they run. The most popular choice for this service today is called Kubernetes. Kubernetes was originally built by Google, but it’s supported today by all of the leading cloud platforms.
Functions
Another option for compute on cloud platforms is an idea called Functions as a Service. Also commonly referred to as serverless computing. The idea is that you need not think about virtual machines or even containers. Instead, a developer can just build applications as functions and invoke those functions directly. This is simple, which is good, and it can also be very cheap because you’re typically charged based only on execution time, which is often quite small. You can wind up having a powerful application that handles lots and lots of requests from many users for not much money.
Managed Data Services
Another category of cloud platform technologies are those for working with data. You can run a database management system such as SQL Server, or MySQL, or Oracle in a virtual machine, an IaaS VM. However, cloud platforms provide managed services for working with data. For example, most of them provide object storage, despite the name, object storage just provides unstructured data, raw bytes. You can also use cloud services for relational storage or for NoSQL storage, such as document-oriented JSON databases. All of these are managed services, which aren’t the same as running your own database in a VM. Managed systems can be simpler, less expensive, and easier to operate than running a standard database system in a VM. They can also scale much better to handle more users and more data.
Low-code Platforms
Cloud platforms provide a broad range of services, but there is another kind of cloud platform that focuses on a very specific thing, helping people who might not be professional developers build new applications quickly and easily. These offerings are commonly known as low code development platforms. A low code platform provides services for creating application logic, working with data, and other things that people building applications need. As the PaaS services are all aimed at professional software developers. That’s generally not true of low code platforms. Pro developers certainly can use them, and they often do, but the real target for most low code platforms is what are known as citizen developers, people who have some technical knowledge but aren’t professional software developers. The goal is to help more people build more applications so organizations can get more apps up and running with less effort. Low code platforms are widely used today. The popular choices include Lightning from Salesforce and Microsoft’s PowerApps. It’s certainly fair to say that the low code approach is an important aspect of cloud platforms today.
