Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Another cloud service that's become very popular is platform as a service. Platform as a service is a lot like infrastructure as a service, but it works further up the technology stack and they just manage more of it.

What PaaS Manages

With platform as a service, it manages that whole underlying infrastructure but also manages the operating system and the runtime environment.

Let's look at an example of this. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is well known to be an infrastructure as a service, or IaaS. What they can do is I can go there and I can spin up a virtual machine, and maybe I choose, well, I'm on a Microsoft server. So I spin up a Microsoft server and then I can install my own applications on it. Let's say I install Microsoft SQL Server. Now I have full control over Microsoft SQL Server. I have full control over the operating system. I just don't have full control over the virtualization and the underlying infrastructure of this. I have a lot of ability to adjust the server the way I want it to be adjusted, to configure it the way I want it to be configured.

But let's say I don't necessarily need all that much control. Instead, what I'd like is for AWS to manage more of it. This infrastructure as a service example right here that I gave is EC2. That's their service that they provide. They have another service called RDS, relational database services, and in that they have a Microsoft SQL as well. So then I can spin up a Microsoft SQL instance and they manage all this underlying infrastructure there.

With this IaaS model, the EC2 instance of Microsoft SQL, I manage all of SQL, I manage all of the operating system. And there's some advantages and disadvantages to that. But if I do the Microsoft SQL in RDS, I don't have to manage all of that. Instead, I can just put data into it and grab data out of it and use it as a database.

Pricing on AWS

Here I'm on the Amazon Web Services site. This is for RDS for SQL Server. They have different RDS instances. Some of them are like MySQL, Aurora. There are different ones that they have with this, but this one's specifically for SQL Server, and we're looking for the pricing.

What I can do is I can still select the size of machine it is. We see they all start with this DB on here. I've got a standard license with this, but we can see DB and it's T3 extra large, which is four CPUs and 16 GB of RAM. And that's going to cost a little over a dollar per hour.

So this is going to be a SQL instance that it's going to spin up, and I actually don't manage the operating system. It's not something I'm going to log into, like their infrastructure as a service, like the EC2 services. It's not like that. Instead, it's just going to give me a web front end, and I can then connect to this database and then be able to send data to the database, change the database, and then everything that I want to manage is either on the front end or doing SQL calls to it. So this looks very different from many aspects.

One of the things that we see that is different is this is a little over a dollar per hour. If I look at an EC2 instance that's a T3 extra large, it's 24 cents per hour. The reason why there's such a larger number there, a dollar per hour, is because we're paying for that SQL licensing, which can be very expensive.

If I wanted to turn up this machine right here and install SQL on this T3 extra large right here, I could do that, and then I could manage all of SQL myself in this EC2 instance. But I will have to pay for extra licensing through Microsoft in order to be able to install this in this environment.

This is their infrastructure as a service, versus this is their platform as a service, because they're managing that platform side. They're managing the SQL Server side of this.