PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications or services without the of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities. All "as-a-service" offerings are characterized as providing low initial cost, incremental cost as your service usage grows, self-service, best practices built-in, resource sharing, automated deployment, management services, lifecycle management, reuse. PaaS provides these capabilities for application and service development.
PaaS offerings may also include facilities for application design, application development, testing, and deployment as well as services such as team collaboration, web service integration, and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation, and developer community facilitation.
