New PaaS Buyer’s Guide: A Spotlight on 7 Leading PaaS Solutions

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is one of the three predominant cloud computing models, along with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). PaaS products play an important role in helping software developers to bring applications to market faster while releasing them from the complexity of configuring, managing, hardware resources. These platforms provide developers with much more automation that standard development environments, but at the cost of less granular control.

There are many benefits to PaaS, but choosing the right solution for you and your company can be a challenge. To help equip software buyers with the knowledge they need to make the right choice, we’ve created the free Buyer’s Guide to PaaS. In the guide, you’ll learn the ins and outs of this complex software, tips you should consider when buying, and the scoop on the industry’s leading products.

Understanding the Basics of PaaS

There are three different types of PaaS which it is important to understand before making a platform choice:

• PaaS tied to a specific SaaS product: The platforms are tightly connected to a SaaS application, like Salesforce or Workday, and are designed for ISVs that wish to extend the platform by adding new capabilities.
• PaaS tied to an operating environment: The most obvious example of this is an IaaS vendor including PaaS capabilities as part of the IaaS.
• Open-cloud PaaS: This is an independent platform that is not tied to an application or operating environment, but is instead a standalone platform. 

Buying new PaaS? Here’s what you should consider:

One thing you should think about when buying new PaaS software is how it will integrate within your existing ecosystem. The Microsoft Azure platform is really a combination of both IaaS and PaaS capabilities, so companies using one also have access to the other. Similarly, companies using AWS as their infrastructure platform can use AWS Elastic Beanstalk at no extra cost. And, Elastic Beanstalk is tightly integrated with the AWS infrastructure. 

It is possible to run an IaaS and PaaS from different vendors, but buyers should be aware that there may be compatibility issues in running heterogenous platforms. If you’re considering this approach, you should absolutely discuss with vendors.

Another decision point is around the degree of abstraction the platform provides. PaaS software insulates developers from a lot of complexity, allowing them to concentrate on developing business logic. However, buyers should also consider adjacent technologies, such as Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), which offer related capabilities. 

CaaS platforms are a good choice for developers who want granular control over containerization tasks, while FaaS platforms are designed to handle allocation of resources automatically, allowing applications to be developed without any thought of implementation, load balancing, or scaling. FaaS is a good choice when developers want to release and iterate new applications very quickly and easily.

What’s in the PaaS buyer’s guide?

The guide highlights 7 of the most-reviewed PaaS products on TrustRadius, and gives readers an at-a-glance view of each product, including:

• A breakdown of users by company size and industry
• Most commonly mentioned pros and cons 
• Direct feedback from reviewers

Curious about whether or not the products on your shortlist made the cut? Here’s the list of 7 Data Center Backup products included in the guide: 

• Microsoft Azure
• Heroku Platform
• AWS Lambda
• Google App Engine
• IBM PaaS Solutions, including IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, IBM Cloud Foundry, and IBM Cloud Functions
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Salesforce Lightning Platform

The guide also provides a comparison matrix, showing feature ratings, recommended comparisons, and how often other buyers are researching each of these products – in case you want to take a page out of their book.

Looking for tips on how to navigate your evaluations more effectively, and avoid unwanted surprises? Along with 7 individual product profiles, this guide includes candid feedback and comments from software end users about the things they struggled with and would do differently during their purchase process and product implementation phase.

Who should read this guide?

If you’re just starting your search for a PaaS product and wondering which products should be on your radar, this guide is for you.

If you’re midway through your product search & selection and want a comprehensive feature comparison matrix, the guide can help here too.

Even if you’re at the end of your product selection phase and are almost ready to sign on the dotted line with one vendor, you may want to check this guide first for the inside scoop on implementation and their post-sales support.

Where to find more resources

Looking for more resources to use in your product research? Our PaaS Software Buyer’s Guide is a great place to start to find more information about a specific product, compare products head-to-head, and see what your fellow integration professionals have to say. But it’s not the only resource out there. (And our research shows the average buyer consults 5.2 different sources of information during their software purchase process!)