Platform as a Service (Paas) provides a complete environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing your applications.  

While offering the same advantages as IaaS, PaaS introduces additional middleware, development tools, business intelligence (BI) services and database management systems that are designed to support developers with the complete application lifecycle (building, testing, deploying, managing and updating) without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases. 

These development tools can drastically reduce the time it takes to code new apps with pre-coded application components and enhancing services built into the platform, such as workflow, directory services or security features. 

With PaaS development teams can work together on projects even when team members are in remote locations as the development environment is accessed over the internet.  

Who should use PaaS? 

PaaS is ideal for software developers that want to make use of development frameworks with built-in software components to create their applications while benefiting of cloud features such as scalability and high-availability.