IT Glossary
What is PaaS?
Platform as a Service: a ready-made cloud platform — you bring the application, the provider manages servers, scaling and everything beneath.
Between “I rent bare servers and administer them myself” (IaaS) and “I use someone else's application” (SaaS) sits the middle floor, built for anyone shipping their own software: PaaS. The idea: the provider maintains the entire substrate — servers, operating systems, patching, scaling, managed databases — while your team simply publishes the application: code goes up, the platform runs it, a traffic spike means resources added automatically, database backups are a checkbox in the settings. Real-world names: Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, Render, plus the managed services of the big clouds (Azure App Service, Google Cloud Run) and their database cousins, where nobody on your team ever performs a manual backup again. If you commission custom software, the relevance is direct in two places: operating cost — an application delivered on PaaS needs no “server person” in any future contract — and speed: a team that isn't administering infrastructure ships features, not system patches. The trade-offs, to be negotiated knowingly: the price per unit of computing is higher than raw IaaS (you pay for the comfort), and platform conventions exist (applications shaped “the platform's way” can be migrated later, but not for free). For most business applications at small-to-mid scale, though, PaaS is simply the sweet spot: infrastructure becomes a small subscription line, not a profession.
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Why it matters for your business
Zero server administration
System updates, patching, scaling, database backups — the platform's job; your team delivers product, not maintenance.
Automatic scaling built in
The campaign traffic spike is absorbed by the platform without midnight interventions — and without oversized servers kept “just in case”.
Minimal running costs at SME scale
An application on PaaS lives on subscriptions of tens to low hundreds of euros a month, with no dedicated infrastructure hire — the line that used to dominate the operating budget.
Frequently asked questions
PaaS or IaaS for the application we're commissioning?
At typical small-business scale: PaaS, almost without debate — operations shrink to a subscription, and your development partner stops billing hours for server administration. IaaS re-enters the conversation with special requirements (exotic software, fine-grained control, strict data-residency rules) or at volumes where the per-resource price gap outweighs the people who would manage it. Ask your vendor for the arithmetic on both — it fits on one page.
What does platform lock-in mean with PaaS — and how serious is it?
Your application adopts the platform's conventions (deployment, attached services, configuration), so moving providers requires adaptation work: days to weeks, not a rewrite. The standard mitigation: containerize the application and keep the database on standard services (managed PostgreSQL, not proprietary stores). The question for your developer: “if the platform tripled its prices, how long and how much to move?” — a concrete answer is the test of the architecture.
What does it cost to run a business application on PaaS?
Order of magnitude for a typical line-of-business app with tens to hundreds of users: from tens of euros up to a few hundred monthly — application, managed database, domain, monitoring. It grows with traffic and data, but gradually and visibly in the billing dashboard. Worth requesting at handover: an estimate of the monthly running cost and budget alerts already configured — cloud bill surprises are preventable with ten minutes of settings.
Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247