Platform as a Service (PaaS) Examples and Use Cases

Oracle’s PaaS solutions

To gain a better understanding of PaaS, let’s look at a real-world example. Oracle’s PaaS offerings provide a complete stack of products that help customers build their PaaS solutions. Most organizations are already running an environment with some workloads on the cloud and others still on premises.

What is PaaS?

With Oracle Database, organizations have the capability to pool database resources and offer customers database as a service via a database cloud.

As an example of PaaS, the Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Platform includes:

Cloud Application Foundation: With Cloud Application Foundation technology, companies can get a comprehensive, integrated security framework. And with Cloud Application Foundation training, they can learn how this technology can simplify all aspects of application deployment.
Cloud integration: With Oracle integration, companies have the power to integrate their cloud and on-premises applications, automate business processes, gain insight into their business processes, develop visual applications, use an SFTP-compliant file server to store and retrieve files, and exchange business documents with a B2B trading partner—all in one place.
Cloud application development: Developers looking for an open, integrated application development platform can use Oracle Cloud to easily build modern, intelligent applications.

Oracle Cloud Identity and Security, as well as Oracle Cloud Management ,are responsible for securing and managing Oracle Database and Oracle Middleware Cloud Platform.

Engineered Systems for PaaS

Continuing with Oracle, as an example, let’s consider how database and middleware functioning as software elements in Oracle’s PaaS system. Specifically, Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud are the hardware and software that drive performance, manageability, security, and efficiency. And Exadata and Exalogic—both fault-tolerant—are also able to scale vertically and horizontally, which makes them ideal for consolidating large amounts of applications.

With top-tier performance, they offer simplified deployment, which means customers don’t have to worry about integrating or configuring them in their datacenters—Oracle does that. And because they help reduce the amount of hardware for an organization, this lowers the total cost of ownership, making them the perfect foundation for PaaS. Without PaaS to help seamlessly bring all on-premises and cloud data into a single platform, an organization will struggle to compete.

PaaS use cases

What situations work best for adopting PaaS? Here are some relevant use cases with tangible benefits.

Budget management with PaaS

Imagine a company that has multiple legacy applications that cost a lot to keep running, but they’d like to reduce operational expenses over time but don’t plan on the applications changing drastically. In this scenario, the company has the potential to cut costs by 50-90%, but many legacy applications cannot easily be changed or managed. That’s why choosing a PaaS with good operational capabilities is key.

A focus on agility

Picture a company that has a new project that needs to be deployed and updated quickly but modifying its existing platform to work with a new PaaS could take time. Selecting a general PaaS provider is a good option here because it doesn’t lock the organization into a single vendor. Additionally, it can solve a large number of problems that will inevitably arise.

Adapting legacy applications

Occasionally, companies have similar applications that it has built to run for different customers, but they don’t share the same code and are expensive to run. To free up resources and improve service, it’s important to consolidate applications and move everyone to a more modern technology.

Spark Innovation

Modern companies want to create an environment that spurs new ideas, boosts productivity, and gets products to market faster. But often times, data is siloed and the current technology prevents the kind of open source idea sharing that innovation thrives on. That’s why it’s important to get employees on board with making the kinds of PaaS changes that will ultimately make the company more successful.

Discover Oracle’s PaaS solution

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure gives organizations of all sizes and industries access to an industry-leading PaaS solution. Learn more about OCI’s PaaS capabilities and features.