# Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a service provides a cloud-based environment with everything required to support the complete lifecycle of building and delivering web-based (cloud) applications — all without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware, software, provisioning and hosting.

Benefits of PaaS:

* Develop application and get to market faster
* Deploy new web applications to the cloud in minutes
* Reduce complexity with middleware as a service

> **Platform as a Service (PaaS).** The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud  infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

While the NIST definition is a good start, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Let’s take a look at the cloud stack as a pyramid to better understand PaaS:

[![Cloud-layers-PaaS](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Cloud-layers-PaaS.png)](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/cloud-computing/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Cloud-layers-PaaS.png)

[Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)](http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/iaas.html) refers to the underlying hardware resources such as network, storage and compute resources, usually with some virtualization technology. While the advent of IaaS opened new territory for businesses to better manage IT hardware costs, it put developers in a challenging situation. Developers are now responsible for more of the operational work during development and test. They have to develop skills to provision, configure, manage and update hardware resources that they would have never needed in a traditional model.


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