Synopses & Reviews
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is gaining serious traction among web and mobile developers, but as new PaaS providers emerge and existing vendors upgrade their features, its hard to keep track of what PaaS has to offer. This thorough introduction takes you through the PaaS model from a developers point of view, and breaks down the types of services that Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and others deliver.
Whether youre an entrepreneur or part of a large enterprise development team, this book shows you how PaaS can help you focus on innovative applications, rather than spend your time worrying about technical operations.
- Track the clouds evolution from IaaS and DevOps to PaaS
- Learn how PaaS combines the simplicity of shared web hosting with the control of dedicated hosting
- Explore the benefits of both portable and non-portable PaaS options
- Apply best practices for moving legacy apps to PaaS—and understand the challenges involved
- Write new applications for PaaS from scratch with RESTful meta-services
- Use PaaS to build mobile apps with backend services that scale
- Examine the core services that each major provider currently offers
- Learn the situations in which PaaS might not be advantageous
Synopsis
As a web application developer, youve had only a few options in the past 20 years: shared web hosting (easy but slow and unreliable) or dedicated web hosting (hard and unreliable). Platform as a service (PaaS) not only gives you a new option, it offers the best of both worlds as an easy, fast, reliable, and scalable solution.
Among other advantages, this book will give you:
- An explanation of the confusion between core cloud technology vs cloud-powered apps like Gmail, Dropbox, etc
- Real life PaaS case studies
- A lesson of the tradeoffs between portable and non-portable PaaS systems
- Code examples of app changes
- An overview of mobile apps on PaaS
About the Author
Doug Baldwin (born November 12, 1952) is a playwright, actor and copywriter living in Portland, Oregon. He began his stage career as an actor, with appearances in many New York theatres, including Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Punch Line, where he acted in a well-reviewed production of Room Service[1]. He has also appeared in feature films (among them Zero Effect andMusic Within) and television shows (Leverage,Nowhere Man, Under Suspicion, etc.), as well as in a number of national TV commercials. His comedy Drawing Down Clio won the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Drama. The Xenophobe was the recipient of a 2000 Oregon Literary Fellowship and won First Place in the 2001 Writers Digest Writing Competition. Suicide Table is his most recent script, and deals with the theme of luck and the role it plays in the lives of two New York City firefighters vacationing in Reno. Baldwin is also a copywriter for large companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, General Foods and Nike.
Table of Contents
Preface; Programming Is Hard; Writing Code That Works on PaaS; Audience; The Structure of This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: The Cloud for Developers; 1.1 The Developer's Plight; 1.2 What the Cloud Has Done for Innovation; 1.3 The Cloud: A Brief History for Programmers; 1.4 The Core of the Cloud; 1.5 Managed Platforms versus Productized Platforms; 1.6 The Cloud's Promise (or Hype); 1.7 The Cloud in Five Years; 1.8 The Promise Fulfilled; Chapter 2: What Is PaaS?; 2.1 Conjuring a Website; 2.2 Early Options for Developers; 2.3 PaaS: The Best of Both Worlds; 2.4 PaaS: A Vital Tool for Modern Apps; 2.5 Conjuring Confidence; Chapter 3: Types of PaaS; 3.1 Non-Portable: Following a Template; 3.2 Portable: No Heavy Lifting Required; 3.3 Summary: Where Do You Want to Live?; 3.4 Dealing with Legacy and Greenfield Apps; 3.5 Tapping Into Services; 3.6 Moving Toward Open Standards; Chapter 4: Moving Legacy Apps to PaaS; 4.1 Initial Considerations; 4.2 Overview; 4.3 Asset Hosting; 4.4 Session Management; 4.5 Caching; 4.6 Asynchronous Processing; 4.7 SQL; 4.8 NoSQL; 4.9 Miscellaneous Gotchas; Chapter 5: Writing New Apps for PaaS; 5.1 Breaking Down the Monolith; 5.2 Leveraging APIs for Mobile Development; 5.3 The Emergence of JSON and REST; 5.4 Consuming RESTful Metaservices; 5.5 The Unique Contribution of PaaS; 5.6 The Effect of Moore's Law; Chapter 6: Mobile Apps on PaaS; 6.1 A Brief History of Mobile App Development; 6.2 The Apps of the Future; 6.3 Data Structures; 6.4 Consuming Metaservices in Mobile Clients; 6.5 How PaaS Makes Mobile Backend Development Easier; 6.6 Serving a Large Audience; Chapter 7: A Look at Core Services; 7.1 Non-PaaS Core Services; 7.2 Evaluating PaaS for Services; 7.3 Saving Time with Managed Databases and PaaS; 7.4 Caches and PaaS: Look for Redundancy; 7.5 Solving the Challenges of Email; 7.6 The Importance of Monitoring; 7.7 Load Testing; 7.8 Planning an Upgrade Path; Chapter 8: Why Not PaaS?; 8.1 Public Cloud versus Private Cloud; 8.2 How to Choose: Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses; 8.3 How to Choose: Enterprise Businesses; 8.4 The Limitations of PaaS; 8.5 Encountering Resistance; 8.6 Putting the Limitations in Perspective; Chapter 9: The Future of PaaS; 9.1 The Influence of OpenStack; 9.2 Keeping Your Development Options Open; 9.3 Outages: Your Biggest Problem; 9.4 Regaining Control Through Open Source; 9.5 Final Thoughts; Chapter 10: Resources; 10.1 PaaS Providers; 10.2 IaaS Providers; 10.3 Managed Services; 10.4 Migrating Legacy Apps to PaaS; 10.5 Greenfield PaaS App Development; Colophon;