Benjamin Guttmann
Published at 23.10.2015
What Is anynines and What Can It Do for You?
What is anynines and what can it do for you? First things first, anynines is a 100% European Platform as a Service (PaaS). But it is way more than just a PaaS, we’ll get to this later. Let’s first answer some questions you might have at this point.
Table of Contents
What is PaaS ?
PaaS, or ‘Platform as a Service’, is a category of cloud computing services. There are two more categories, IaaS, ‘Infrastructure as a Service’, and SaaS, ‘Software as a Service’. To get to know more about the differences between each category, continue reading, there will be some explaining later.
A PaaS provides a platform and an environment to users which allow them to develop, run, test, and manage their web apps. The user does not have to buy or manage the underlying infrastructure and therefore can concentrate on development. In addition to the VM with an OS (which you can get as IaaS), PaaS also delivers the middleware and the runtime environment. It often supports several possibilities for programming languages, frameworks, and databases but all without configuring a server by yourself.
Originally PaaS was intended to be a public service in the public cloud, before expanding it to include_private_ and hybrid options.
- Public PaaS: The public PaaS is the most common form of cloud-computing. In this form the benefits of a PaaS are bigger than in the other to forms. Because the data of the PaaS is often stored by a Third-Party you have to think about topics like data privacy.
- Private PaaS: A private PaaS is a cloud system used within a company. There are different sorts of private PaaS like an inhouse cloud where the PaaS is provided by a internal service provider. If this service provider is a Third-Party provider (provider hosted cloud) you have to think about privacy issues once again. In this case the connection takes place via VPN.
- Hybrid PaaS: The hybrid PaaS is kind of mixed form of private and public. In this case the private cloud is implemented as a inhouse cloud but for performance reasons third-party capacities can be added to the inhouse capacities.
Why to use PaaS ?
I think, this is a good question. Why should anyone prefer a PaaS over an ordinary hosting provider that we all know about? Why not just set up your own infrastructure to support your web app as usual?
The answer is simple: using a PaaS, users do not have to deal with the technical realization of the services, so to say all the back-end things about setting up and managing servers should be done automatically and transparently in the background. The PaaS-providers give a set of tools and services to you, designed to make coding and deploying applications quick and efficient. Therefore, they don’t have any acquisition costs for underlying infrastructure.
A PaaS can also ensure a high level of availability even after failure of a component: It often serves more instances of a component to guarantee its functionality is working all the time. The user can concentrate on developing rather than putting effort in setting up the infrastructure. Users of Platform as a Service can worry just about their applications, not about cpu or memory usage, or the fact how much machines they need to satisfy their user base.
At the moment there are two main kinds of PaaS, for the first one it does not matter which data source you are using (e.g. Heroku), it is a collaborative platform for software development. The second one is a platform, which allows the creation of software utilizing proprietary data from an application (e.g. Salesforce). There are some situations in which using PaaS is extremely useful, e.g. any situation where multiple developers will be working on a single project. It is also recommended when developers want to automate testing and deployment services.
What are the differences to SaaS and IaaS?
Software as a Service (SaaS): Software created by a company which is ready to be used by customers/end-users. Software is located in the cloud. Often this software does not need any individual configuration, that means that SaaS is often so called standard software without any customizing, e.g. office applications.
The services are offered on a infrastructure which is managed by the provider so the user rents the software and also the hardware needed for this in an all-in-one package, but only for the duration of usage. One advantage of SaaS is that fixing bugs or developing new features is task of the provider, this will be rolled-out by updates or new releases of the software, but the user will always be up-to-date.Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Offers physical servers or virtual machines, that means you will get servers, storage, networks, operating systems as an on-demand service. This allows dynamic scaling. IaaS often has a variable cost, utility pricing model and in general it includes multiple users on a single piece of hardware. The service allows users to get a virtual machine on demand, these machines can be bare bones systems running just an operating system or one with some preloaded software stack. The OS is delivered with the VM.
The user is in charge of managing the resources on that machine, so memory and cpu usage are left to the user to administer. Today there are two kinds of IaaS which are offered the most, first one are the services which offer capacity to store data to the user (Amazon S3, Dropbox), second one are the services offering computing power (Google Compute Engine). Because the user is in control over every layer above the OS, you can say that an IaaS offers the same possibilities as a physical server in a datacenter would do.Backend as a Service (BaaS): Offers the possibility to create your own cloud-backend for your mobile, tablet and web apps. At the moment you can divide providers of BaaS into two categories: first, the consumer BaaS which focuses more on “smaller” brand-apps or games and the second one the enterprise BaaS where the focus is on mobilizing sensitive, business-critical data from enterprise systems. Some BaaS also provide features such as user management, push notifications or integration with social networking services.
Why to use anynines?
anynines …
… is a 100% European Platform as a Service (PaaS)
As mentioned before, anynines is a 100% European Platform as a Service (Paas). All our datacenters are located in Germany, this means: European privacy laws and no messing around with things like the US Patriot Act.
… combines IaaS and PaaS
At anynines we manage both for you, the IaaS and the PaaS. The Infrastructure as a Service that offers you the virtual machines is configured by us. The hypervisor, which is in our case powered by OpenStack, runs all the virtual machines, and the additional resources like file-based storage and load balancers. The PaaS layer that brings all the things you need to deploy your application is based on Cloud Foundry. As you can see, if there should be any problems, we are aware of our whole system and can solve any issues independent of other providers.
… easy scaling of instances
Because our PaaS is based on Cloud Foundry scaling of instances is as easy as pie. All you need is just one single line of code in the command-line tool, you can get exactly the number of instances you want to. That is really simple, isn’t it?
So you are flexible enough to get more instances at times when your application is high populated, to ensure a perfect user experience in case of loading-times and availability and if the rush-hour is over, you can just scale your instances down to a lower number.
… supports the use of buildpacks
To ensure excellent performance across languages and frameworks, we use the well-known concept of buildpacks. There are already a lot of buildpacks available like Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, Go and many more.
For the case that there is no buildpack that meets your needs you can create a buildpack by your own and use it to deploy your app.
In addition to this we offer a number of databases and other services to you, at the moment they are PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, OpenStack Swift out of the box.
… makes it is quite easy to use your own domain or your own SSL certificates
There is no problem to use your own domain to address you application, and also you can use your own SSL certificates with it. We just got a small How To.
With anynines it is possible to easily deploy, scale, and manage your apps with just one single line of code. Since deployment is so easy you also have more release cycles, which ensures a higher software quality.
Perhaps the most important thing to many people is that anynines got a great customer support with people who know what they are doing and always try to do their best job for you.
You think that sounds great? We think so, too. So let’s give it a try and start your trial right now. If you have any questions, comment below or get in touch with us on https://enterprise.anynines.com.
Sources:
https://www.profitbricks.de/cloud-lexikon/paas
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_Service
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
https://www.itwissen.info/definition/lexikon/PaaS-platform-as-a-service-Platform-as-a-Service.html
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