7 Benefits of Using PaaS to Support Your Application Lifecycle

The application development process is full of many steps. As you move from concept to application delivery there are many portions of the process that are comprised of frequent, repetitive tasks. These time-consuming operations can detract valuable resources from doing more strategic development work – slowing down the project and inefficiently using resources.

PaaS, by design, enables automation. Tedious maintenance tasks, such as provisioning storage and configuring domain name settings can, in some cases be completely automated. This automation can have a dramatic effect on development time, enabling application delivery on a much more rapid pace.

Accelerating application development is one thing, but to properly sustain the development lifecycle, you also need to employ governance. By standardizing on governed best practices, you gain the peace of mind that you can more efficiently support and maintain your applications without infrastructure constraints.

In theory, PaaS makes governance easier by centralizing resource management. In practice, governance can be just as difficult as ever, unless you incorporate the right tools and processes into your workflow that brings PaaS governance alive. With advanced tools to support you, you can easily wrap a governance framework around your PaaS-based applications that is centered on the application – not the underlying infrastructure. This means that your applications will be easier to support or enhance, no matter who is working on them, or where they’re stored, today or in the future.

With the move to the cloud comes the need for portability. Portability can be a particular challenge for applications that are developed using a more traditional, on-premises development model. When apps are built to be reliant upon the components of the infrastructure and their dependencies then cloud provider vendor lock-in becomes a prominent challenge.

Leveraging the value of PaaS for application development and using best practices and tools, you can eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in at the cloud provider level. With PaaS, you can build your applications from an application-centric perspective. Thus, the underlying infrastructure becomes much less relevant and applications can be more easily moved, when needed, to support the changing needs of the business.

The desire to simplify development goes beyond accelerating the coding process, it makes innovation and agility easier. This is particularly critical for developing applications at scale.

Using PaaS, you can actually change your development game. Smart, PaaS optimized tools are available that will simplify and streamline the coding process, improving both development time and quality. By using proven frameworks and configuration tools, you can assure best practices and standards are used while making it easier for less skilled developers to accelerate their contributions, in a more rapid elevated manner.

Traditional application development, based on on-premises architectures and infrastructure, have budget requirements that are largely consumed by capital expenses. And those hardware costs can be hard to anticipate, causing needless overprovisioning to accommodate unknown requirements for scale.

Using PaaS, the total cost of ownership for applications can be dramatically reduced as you move from a Capex to an Opex cost model. Now, rather than spending budget on hardware, you can invest in staff and innovation while benefiting from a cost structure that is elastic and scales with application demands provided by the PaaS services.

PaaS is generally available in public, multi-tenant environments where multiple users may share the same underlying resources, the cloud providers have proven their ability to manage this aspect securely. This has given rise to new concerns around the challenges, complexity and security risks that come with managing the wide array of distributed resources that comprise your various applications.

However, when PaaS is paired with an advanced developer framework, security can actually be enhanced for PaaS-based applications as compared with on-premises architectures. Why? Because built-in standards and security layers including encryption, endpoint management, session management, and roles and rights options give development teams the security controls they need to mitigate risk. This combined with the layers of security provided by PaaS service providers means that applications will benefit from multiple levels of security defense.

All these PaaS benefits add up to deliver value that can be realized more quickly than you may ever imagine. Not only can you deploy new instances in a matter of seconds, you’ll gain access to a predictable and uniform environment that will take the guesswork out of both development and management operations.

When paired with advanced tool frameworks that unify and standardize your cloud-centric application development, PaaS will empower your development team with everything they need to deliver the new applications and innovations that will provide you unmatched business agility and keep you one step ahead of your competition.

As you look to develop, deploy and manage applications in the cloud, PaaS can empower your journey to innovate faster, more cost effectively and with less risk. By creating a winning strategy to support the lifecycle of your applications with cloud-based development your digital transformation goals are within close reach.