ABSTRACT
The main objective of this chapter is to introduce the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS) and its development using Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology. After reading this chapter, you will
• Understand how SaaS applications are different from traditional software/application
• Understand how SaaS benefits the service providers and the end users
• Understand the pros and cons of different SaaS delivery models • Understand the challenges that are introduced by SaaS applications • Understand how to develop a cloud-aware SaaS applications using
PaaS technology
This chapter gives an insight about SaaS applications that are different and offer many advantages when compared to traditional applications. We cannot choose the SaaS delivery option for all kinds of applications. The suitability of SaaS is also discussed in this chapter as well as the many SaaS deployment and delivery models available for SaaS development. Even though SaaS applications offer more advantages to the consumers, they bring a lot of challenges to developers with regard to SaaS application development, and this chapter will further discuss these challenges. An overview of other cloud service models such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as
a Service (PaaS) that can be leveraged to develop multitenant-aware, scalable, and highly available SaaS applications is detailed in this chapter. This chapter also gives an idea about achieving secured multitenancy at the database level with different multitenancy models. Finally, the chapter discusses about the monitoring and SLA maintenance of SaaS applications.
