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Comparing PaaS offerings in light of SaaS development

A comparison of PaaS platforms based on a practical case study

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Abstract

Software vendors increasingly aim to apply the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model instead of the traditional on-premise model. Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), such as Google App Engine and Windows Azure, deliver a computing platform and solution stack as a service, but they also aim to facilitate the development of cloud applications (SaaS). Such PaaS offerings should enable third parties to build and deliver multi-tenant SaaS applications while shielding the complexity of the underpinning middleware and infrastructure. This paper compares, on the basis of a practical case study, three different and representative PaaS platforms with respect to their support for SaaS application development. We have reengineered an on-premise enterprise application into a SaaS application and we have subsequently deployed it in three PaaS-based cloud environments. We have investigated the following qualities of the PaaS platforms from the perspective of SaaS development: portability of the application code base, available support for creating and managing multi-tenant-aware applications, and quality of the tool support.

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Notes

  1. http://distrinet.cs.kuleuven.be/software/PaaS-evaluation/.

  2. This is a generic observation, early practitioners of parallel computing shared similar and essential concerns.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to improve this paper. We also thank Wouter De Borger, Maarten Decat and Dimitri Van Landuyt for proofreading. This research is partially funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven, the iMinds CUSTOMSS and SecCAS projects and by the EU FP7 project NESSoS. The iMinds CUSTOMSS is a project co-funded by iMinds (Interdisciplinary institute for Technology), a research institute founded by the Flemish Government. Companies and organizations involved in the project are Agfa Healthcare, Televic Healthcare and UnifiedPost, with project support of IWT (government agency for Innovation by Science and Technology).

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  1. iMinds-DistriNet, KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200A, Postbox 2402, 3001 , Leuven, Belgium

    Stefan Walraven, Eddy Truyen & Wouter Joosen

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  1. Stefan Walraven
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Correspondence to Stefan Walraven.

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Walraven, S., Truyen, E. & Joosen, W. Comparing PaaS offerings in light of SaaS development. Computing 96, 669–724 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-013-0346-9

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