Thomas Ruland of cloudControl, has written an article for us explaining Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and to offer our readers a free trial of their PaaS solutions.
A new web-project often is accompanied by new challenges and lots of work that has to be taken care of even before you can get started with the project itself. Web servers need to be set up, matching packages to be selected and a continuous cycle of back-ups and maintenance to be initiated. Every new project includes those labour intensive steps – but let’s ask ourselves: We live in 2011, do we really need to do those annoying tasks ourselves? Well, we don’t, because today platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers offer ready-to-use services for web developers to build their applications.
Traditional hosting offers tangible servers, with all the needed set up and configuration work. PaaS in comparison offers one fully equipped platform with resources ready to use from the Cloud. This environment offers numerous advantages, the five most important of which are:
- No administrative hassle
- Automatic scaling
- Pay-per-use billing
- One platform
- Developing with teams
Each of the above points is explored in more detail below.
1. No administrative hassle
Most PaaS providers offer fully maintained and specifically installed components that don’t need to be installed or kept-up-to date by the user. Maintenance and backups are performed by the provider, so the developer can focus on the essentials: developing his web applications.
2. Automatic scaling
With conventional hosting, traffic peaks are something to be afraid of – not so for PaaS. PaaS providers deliver their computing power from the Cloud by being able to add hundreds of servers to their resource pool within seconds. So if your application has a peak, the PaaS provider just gives you more power and the peak is taken care of. Most providers also publish where their servers are physically located at.
3. Pay-per-use billing
A big advantage of PaaS is to allow customers to only pay for the resources they actually did consume. If an application consumes few resources, it costs just a bit. If a customer has a complex CMS with lots of users more resources will be assigned to it so it costs more. At any time the application performs perfectly and the customer is satisfied.
4. One single platform
As a web developer, one often has multiple customers and hosting provider, with several different log-in credentials. With a PaaS solution, you can rely on a single platform for developing, testing and hosting your projects. And the best part about it is that you can not only use the platform for one of your customers, but for all of them.
5. Web development in teams
With PaaS, you can simply add additional developers to your applications. No more long explanations via e-mail or chats to get some help or advice. PaaS enables being team-ready within seconds.
Platform-as-a-Service from cloudControl
When searching for a suitable PaaS provider, there is a lot to be taken into consideration. Until now, there has been no single vendor who was able to fully implement all five advantages. The largest vendors in the market still have major constraints in their solutions, such as lock-in effects, lacking PHP support, or data privacy concerns.
The new cloudControl PHP platform-as-a-Service solution deals with those issues and provides an excellent basis for the development and hosting of complex PHP applications such as online stores, content management systems or web-based business applications (Software-as-a-Service). The PaaS solution provided by cloudControl will take care of all labor-intensive tasks related to administration, scaling and reliability, so that developers can fully concentrate on developing their apps.
Unlike other PaaS providers such as Google and Microsoft, cloudControl relies on proven LAMP stack components in order to avoid lock-in effects. Via command-line client, developers can easily control the platform and expand the usability by employing add-ons (such as MySQL, Memcache or MongoDB) from cloudControl’s marketplace. cloudControl ensures computing power by using Amazon EC2 Compute Units.
Fair Pricing Model
The pricing model of cloudControl employs the premises to be fair and developer-friendly. For an example, there is no minimum contract period or questionable terms of use. The billing units at cloudControl are called “boxes”. Each “box” can process 2 PHP requests simultaneously. The performance of each box equals to a quarter of an Amazon EC2 Compute Unit. This, at first, seems not to be much, but the boxes only serve dynamic requests. All other requests, such as pictures or Java Script files, are answered by the webserver (with Varnish cache also being active). The billing depends on the resources being consumed, additional add-ons, such as MySQL or Memcached, are available in multiple sizes.
Free Trial
Those who are interested can get started with the cloudControl PHP cloud right now and try out their PaaS solution for free. After a quick set-up of the working environment, the first test application is online within a few minutes. cloudControl also offers a free trail account for developers, which includes a free box for every application and a 5 MB database.
cloudControl was awarded the 2009 hosting award by eco and is a listed Amazon AWS solution providee. Click here for more information on cloudControl cloud hosting.
