Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an innovative cloud computing model that helps to deliver applications over the web. In this model, a cloud provider offers hardware and software tools, typically those required for application development, to the users as a service. The cloud infrastructure provides the ability to efficiently and quickly design and deploy apps and have them functioning reliably. Typically, the platform functions as an enabler of cloud applications.
This article highlights the following PaaS providers along with their unique benefits.
Heroku is a cloud platform based on a managed container system, with integrated data services and a powerful ecosystem for deploying and running modern apps. The cloud platform enables developers to design, deploy, monitor and scale apps in an efficient and simple way.
It integrates well with the PHP programming language, streamlining and simplifying the process of developing, deploying, configuring, tuning, scaling and managing apps. The Heroku developer experience is an app-centric approach for software delivery, integrated with today’s most popular developer tools and workflows.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer a wide spectrum of global storage, compute, analytics, database, application and deployment services that help companies to lower IT costs, move faster and scale applications in the cloud.
A unique AWS SDK is available for PHP, which is an open source, modern PHP library that makes it easier to integrate PHP apps with AWS services like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Glacier, and Amazon S3. You can take advantage of the power of Amazon Elastic Beanstalk for autoscaling, application health monitoring, and automatic load-balancing. One of the big benefits is that AWS is constantly adding new tools, so you are always likely to have the latest tools at hand.
Google App Engine enables you to build and host applications on the same systems that power Google’s very own applications. Google provides a number of services and APIs including Memcache, SQL and NoSQL databases, object storage using Cloud Storage, secure authentication, scaling and A/B splitting of apps and traffic and IoT.
Google App Engine supports many different languages and allows for integration with other technologies such as Hadoop, MongoDB, and many others.
Microsoft Azure arguably provides the best and widest array of PaaS offerings across many different programming languages. You can easily deploy your PHP application on Azure via Azure App Services or docker containers with Kubernetes.
Azure provides many popular PaaS services like Redis, Elasticsearch, storage, many database providers and much more.
The full-stack Ruby on Rails DevOps experts. Engine Yard is for developers who are creating Node.js, Ruby on Rails and PHP applications and want the power of the cloud without the hassle of operations management. You can manage snapshots, administer databases, manage clusters, perform backups and do load-balancing.
Engine Yard’s advantages include dedicated instances, lots of control over virtual machine instances and integration with private and public Git repositories. Integration of 3rd-party services like Redis, SendGrid, and Memcached, Engine Yard provides the core building blocks for secure, scalable and flexible PHP apps. Another beneficial feature of Engine Yard is that it runs self-contained environments, so your resources will not be impacted by another application.
Fortrabbit is one of the favorite PaaS to use with PHP. It is equipped with tons of features like Composer integration, Git deployment, persistent storage, deployment file, collaboration, SSH, and SFTP. Another strength of Fortrabbit is it facilitates security maintenance, disaster recovery, failure tolerance and independent data center units with autonomous network uplinks and power supply. Fortrabbit is affordable as shared hosting, powerful as VPS hosting and carefree as managed hosting
OpenShift is Red Hat’s entirely open source container-based PaaS platform, providing developers with an integrated development environment (IDE) for building and deploying Docker-formatted containers and managing Kubernetes. OpenShift Origin supports Java EE6, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl, MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, same that of OpenShift Online and OpenShift Enterprise. Red Hat offers a few different options for developers with either hosted, private or open source PaaS projects. Another key benefit of OpenShift is the automated workflows that auto-scales in order to handle peak workloads.
With many apps growing every day using Laravel applications, Forge is making deployment easy and painless for Laravel programmers. Built for Laravel, but it don’t discriminate other frameworks like Symfony, WordPress, Statamic, Craft and any other PHP application can easily be installed on a Forge server.
Forge is packed with Nginx, PHP 7.2, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and all of the other goodies you need on the cloud. No more outdated PHP installations. Forge integrates with LetsEncrypt, allowing you to obtain free SSL certificates for your Forge powered applications. The best part is deploying code is just push to the master on your GitHub, Bitbucket, or custom Git repository.
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