PaaS is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. It’s designed to support the complete web application life-cycle – from building through to testing, deploying managing and updating.

Like IaaS, it includes architecture, such as networking, servers and storage, but also business intelligence services, development tools, middleware, database management systems and more.

By allowing you to only buy the resources you need, PaaS means you avoid the complexity and expense of buying and managing software licences, infrastructure and other resources.