What Is Platform as a Service?
2026-10-27
The cloud can provide not only basic IT resources such as processing power and storage, but also more advanced services—for example, a complete environment for developing, deploying, and running applications. This model is known as Platform as a Service (PaaS).
The specific set of PaaS tools depends on the provider, but customers generally receive programming-language runtimes, database management systems, API gateways, containerization tools such as Kubernetes, and monitoring and logging systems.
Platform as a Service is particularly useful for developing microservices. However, when choosing a specific offering, it is essential to examine the components provided by the cloud operator carefully: which programming languages and runtimes are supported, how security is implemented, what the SLA covers, and how PaaS usage is actually billed.