Awesome PaaS

A curated list of awesome PaaS resources.

Services and Solutions

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications and services developed with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker on familiar servers such as Apache, Nginx, Passenger, and IIS.

• Azure App Service: Use Azure App Service to create powerful cloud apps for web and mobile clients running on any platform or device faster than ever before.

• Cloud Foundry (Open Source): an open source cloud application platform backed by Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and more.

• Dokku: The smallest PaaS implementation you've ever seen.

• Flynn: A next generation open source platform as a service. Flynn is designed to run anything that can run on Linux, not just stateless web apps. Flynn comes with highly available database appliances, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB.

• Google App Engine: Google App Engine lets developers build scalable web and mobile backends in any language on Google's infrastructure.

• Heroku: 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.

• OKD aka OpenShift Origin: The Community Distribution of Kubernetes that powers Red Hat OpenShift. Built around a core of OCI container packaging and Kubernetes container cluster management, OKD is also augmented by application lifecycle management functionality and DevOps tooling. OKD provides a complete open source container application platform. OKD is also referred to as Origin in github and in the documentation.

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry: Continuously deliver any app to every major private and public cloud with a single platform.

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform: The Kubernetes platform for big ideas. Focus on writing code and let OpenShift build, run, and scale your apps in the cloud. Red Hat OpenShift helps teams deliver faster with containers and Kubernetes.

• SAP Cloud Platform: The business platform to innovate, connect and extend your business. Based on Cloud Foundry.

• T-Systems AppAgile PaaS: The modular Platform-as-a-Service offering (PaaS) combines technical development platforms with quickly available business applications from the cloud and can be used as a managed service with no significant development outlay.

Case Studies and Success Stories

• Heroku Customers

• Cloud Foundry Case Studies

• Microsoft Azure App Service Case Studies

• OpenShift Success Stories

• Pivotal Case Studies

• Pivotal Customers

• SAP Cloud Platform Success Stories

Quick Starts

Azure App Service

• Create an ASP.NET Core web app in Azure: With Visual Studio.

• Create a Node.js web app in Azure: With ZIP upload.

• Create a PHP web app in Azure: With git push.

• Create your first Java web app in Azure: With Eclipse and Azure Toolkit for Eclipse.

• Create a static HTML web app in Azure: With Azure CLI in Azure Cloud Shell.

• Build a Python and PostgreSQL app in Azure App Service: With Azure CLI and git push deploy in Azure Cloud Shell.

• Deploy a Docker/Go web app in Web App for Containers: With Azure CLI and docker image deployment in Azure Cloud Shell.

• Continuous deployment to Azure App Service: Continous deployment from GitHub, BitBucket or Azure DevOps Repos.

• Tutorial: Host a RESTful API with CORS in Azure App Service: With .NET Core, Azure CLI, local git deploy.

• Provision and deploy microservices predictably in Azure: With Azure Resource Manager Templates and PowerShell scripting.

• Sync content from a cloud folder to Azure App Service: With sync from Dropbox or OneDrive.

OpenShift and OKD

• Getting started with Minishift: Shows how to prepare a virtualization environment on macOS, Linux or Windows, set up Minishift, and start using it. Minishift is a tool that helps you run OKD locally by launching a single-node OKD cluster inside a virtual machine. With Minishift you can try out OKD or develop with it, day-to-day, on your local machine.

• Installing OKD 3.10 on a Single Host: A video that shows how to install OKD from start to finish using the Ansible playbooks that are provided as the official way to install a cluster. This is more involved than using the OKD Docker image or Minishift but better suited to a system that is meant to be always running. Works with OKD 3.11, too.

• Adding an SSL certificate to OKD: A companion video to 'Installing OKD 3.10 on a single host' to add a Let's encrypt certificate to the console.

• Free Wildcard Certificates and OpenShift: A blog post explaining how to add a Let's encrypt wildcard certificate to an existing OKD or OpenShift installation for both the console and the deployed apps.

• OKD Getting started as a developer: Web console walkthrough: This getting started experience walks you through the simplest way to get a sample project up and running on OKD using the web console.

• OKD Getting started as a developer: Command-line walkthrough: This getting started experience walks you through the simplest way to get a sample project up and running on OKD using the command-line.

Documentation

• Azure App Service Overview

• Azure App Service Mobile Apps

• Azure App Service API Apps

Reference Architectures

Azure App Service

• Basic web app

• Web app with improved scalability

• Web app in multiple regions

• Wep app monitoring

Courses and Trainings

• OpenShift Interactive Learning Portal: Interactive learning scenarios with pre-configured OpenShift instances. Use it to experiment with and learn to use OpenShift.

Books

• Duncann Winn: Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide. O'Reilly, 2017

• Graham Dumpleton: Deploying to OpenShift: A guide for busy developers, O'Reilly, 2018

• Jamie Duncan, John Osborne: OpenShift in Action. Manning, 2018

• Denis Zuev, Artemii Kropachev: Learn OpenShift: Deploy, build, manage, and migrate applications with OpenShift Origin 3.9. Packt, 2018

• SAP Cloud Platform: Tools and Services. SAP Press, 2019 Yet to be published.

Pricing

• Azure App Service Pricing

Analyst Reports

• Forrester: The total economic impact of Microsoft PaaS: A Microsoft commissioned study from 2016 to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by shifting their application development and deployment to Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

• Forrester: The total economic impact of Pivotal Cloud Foundry: Cost savings and business benefits enabled by Pivotal Cloud Foundry. A Pivotal commissioned study from 2017.

• Gartner: Cloud strategy leadership: Gartner insights on how and why leaders must implement cloud computing.

• Gartner: The key trends in PaaS, 2018

• IDC: PaaS: Emerging trends and strategies

News and Blog Posts (latest first)

• Reza Shafii: Kubernetes guideposts for 2019. OpenShift Blog, Jan 2019 Reza predicts automated operations will be the next step, federation V2 will make multi-cloud easier, serverless comes to Kubernetes and 2019 will be the year of hybrid serverless, k8s will enable hybrid operations for containers and virtual machines and it'll be on bare metal, open source developer communities target k8s by default, we will see workloads start moving back to the datacenter.

• Dan Meyer: Cloud Foundry Adopts a Pair of Kubernetes-Based Projects. SDXCentral, Oct. 2018,: Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR), which allows for deploying containers using Bosh and Kubernetes. Eirini, which allows operators and vendors to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. CF Containerization, which packages Bosh into containers that are deployed into Kubernetes. This allows operators to deploy the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime into existing clusters. CFCR was the beachhead for Cloud Foundry into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Eirini and CF Containerization build on that approach.

• Jeff Hobbs: Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry: Better together. The New Stack. Apr. 2018

• Peter Eriksson: The key trends in PaaS 2018. Feb. 2018

• Kurt Marko: Building the convincing PaaS business case. Diginomica, Jan 2018

Misc

• Richard Watson: I don't always evaluate PaaS with a list of criteria, but when I do, it's this list: A meme themed article on Gartner Blog Nework from 2015.

• Sunitha Muthukrishna: Best Practices: Windows Azure Websites (WAWS), Feb. 2014: Best practices for web apps running on Azure App Service: Building a scalable architecture, designing the architecture to be resilient for failures, automating, deploying, testing in staging, diagnostics logging, monitoring and security.

• Yochay Kiriaty, Stefan Schackow: Inside the Azure App Service Architecture

• Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR): An open-source project that provides a solution for deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters using BOSH on AWS, GCP, OpenStack and vSphere. Formerly named Kubo.

• Cloud Foundry Stratos: A Web-based Console UI for Cloud Foundry.

• OpenShift AeroGear: Cloud Native Mobile App Development on OpenShift. AeroGear provides a suite of Mobile Services across a range of native and hybrid client SDKs that will simplify your mobile and modern application development needs, leveraging OpenShift's Container technology to provide a secure, scalable backend platform. AeroGear provides solutions for Identitiy Management, Push Notifications, Mobile Metrics, Mobile CI/CD and Device Security.

• Secrets of successful Cloud Foundry Users: An infographic.