Programming for PaaS: A Practical Guide to Coding for Platform-as-a-Service

Lucas Carlson

Jul 2013 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

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, it’s hard to keep track of what PaaS has to offer. This thorough introduction takes you through the PaaS model from a developer’s point of view, and breaks down the types of services that Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and others deliver.

Whether you’re 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 cloud’s 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

About the author

Lucas Carlson founded AppFog, a PaaS company that leveraged Cloud Foundry and was acquired by CenturyLink. Lucas has been a professional developer for 20 years and specializes in Ruby on Rails development. Lucas has authored Programming for PaaS and the Ruby Cookbook and has written half a dozen libraries in various programming languages and contributed to many others, including Rails and RedCloth. He maintains a personal website at rufy.com.