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

by Lucas Carlson, Doug Baldwin

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449334901
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	08/13/2013
Pages:	142
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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.

Table of Contents

Preface; Programming Is Hard; Writing Code That Works on PaaS; Audience; The Structure of This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: The Cloud for Developers; 1.1 The Developer’s Plight; 1.2 What the Cloud Has Done for Innovation; 1.3 The Cloud: A Brief History for Programmers; 1.4 The Core of the Cloud; 1.5 Managed Platforms versus Productized Platforms; 1.6 The Cloud’s Promise (or Hype); 1.7 The Cloud in Five Years; 1.8 The Promise Fulfilled; Chapter 2: What Is PaaS?; 2.1 Conjuring a Website; 2.2 Early Options for Developers; 2.3 PaaS: The Best of Both Worlds; 2.4 PaaS: A Vital Tool for Modern Apps; 2.5 Conjuring Confidence; Chapter 3: Types of PaaS; 3.1 Non-Portable: Following a Template; 3.2 Portable: No Heavy Lifting Required; 3.3 Summary: Where Do You Want to Live?; 3.4 Dealing with Legacy and Greenfield Apps; 3.5 Tapping Into Services; 3.6 Moving Toward Open Standards; Chapter 4: Moving Legacy Apps to PaaS; 4.1 Initial Considerations; 4.2 Overview; 4.3 Asset Hosting; 4.4 Session Management; 4.5 Caching; 4.6 Asynchronous Processing; 4.7 SQL; 4.8 NoSQL; 4.9 Miscellaneous Gotchas; Chapter 5: Writing New Apps for PaaS; 5.1 Breaking Down the Monolith; 5.2 Leveraging APIs for Mobile Development; 5.3 The Emergence of JSON and REST; 5.4 Consuming RESTful Metaservices; 5.5 The Unique Contribution of PaaS; 5.6 The Effect of Moore’s Law; Chapter 6: Mobile Apps on PaaS; 6.1 A Brief History of Mobile App Development; 6.2 The Apps of the Future; 6.3 Data Structures; 6.4 Consuming Metaservices in Mobile Clients; 6.5 How PaaS Makes Mobile Backend Development Easier; 6.6 Serving a Large Audience; Chapter 7: A Look at Core Services; 7.1 Non-PaaS Core Services; 7.2 Evaluating PaaS for Services; 7.3 Saving Time with Managed Databases and PaaS; 7.4 Caches and PaaS: Look for Redundancy; 7.5 Solving the Challenges of Email; 7.6 The Importance of Monitoring; 7.7 Load Testing; 7.8 Planning an Upgrade Path; Chapter 8: Why Not PaaS?; 8.1 Public Cloud versus Private Cloud; 8.2 How to Choose: Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses; 8.3 How to Choose: Enterprise Businesses; 8.4 The Limitations of PaaS; 8.5 Encountering Resistance; 8.6 Putting the Limitations in Perspective; Chapter 9: The Future of PaaS; 9.1 The Influence of OpenStack; 9.2 Keeping Your Development Options Open; 9.3 Outages: Your Biggest Problem; 9.4 Regaining Control Through Open Source; 9.5 Final Thoughts; Chapter 10: Resources; 10.1 PaaS Providers; 10.2 IaaS Providers; 10.3 Managed Services; 10.4 Migrating Legacy Apps to PaaS; 10.5 Greenfield PaaS App Development; Colophon;