What is PaaS (Platform as a Service) & Why Use It?

In cloud computing, there are three major acronyms you probably hear daily: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. What exactly falls under the realm of "Platform as a Service", and why is it currently dominating modern development?

The Evolution of Hosting

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): Providers like AWS EC2 or DigitalOcean Droplets. They provide raw servers. You manage the OS, networking, security, and the application runtime.

SaaS (Software as a Service): Products like Google Docs or Salesforce. The entire application is built and managed by someone else.

PaaS (Platform as a Service) sits directly in the middle. Providers like Remoud, Railway, and originally Heroku. The provider manages the server, networking, routing, and Docker execution environment. You just bring the code.

Why Use a PaaS?

• Reduced DevOps Burden: A PaaS means your team requires fewer specialized DevOps engineers, liberating engineers to build product features.
• Velocity: Most PaaS providers connect directly to GitHub. Simply commit your code, and the platform securely routes traffic and builds the new container version.
• Built-In Tools: SSL generation, logging streams, and performance metrics are universally included out of the box.

The Transition

If you're still manually configuring VPS systems over SSH, making the jump to a PaaS represents one of the largest workflow upgrades a developer can experience.