Programming for PaaS by Lucas Carlson

Author:Lucas Carlson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: COMPUTERS / Web / General
ISBN: 9781449334895
Publisher: O’Reilly Media
Published: 2013-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Independent Thinking

Consider a common scenario for large businesses and financial or government institutions, where you’re building an application that has data-constrained portions that can only run in house. This data-restricted part of your application usually ends up being a small fraction of the app, perhaps 5% to 10%.

If you build your application monolithically, the entire application will have to be run in house due to the data constraints. However, if you build it to run as a distributed system, with many APIs feeding into a lightweight JavaScript frontend, or even a simple dynamic frontend that consumes other service APIs, you can still host 90% of your application safely in the public cloud. All the mundane pieces that do not interact with sensitive data can be run on commodity hardware that is cheaper to run in the cloud.

We’ve seen many successful examples of this modern service-oriented, API-driven architecture. We already mentioned Twitter, but Gmail also took a very API-driven, client-side approach, putting together APIs that interact with the mail and having the frontend JavaScript client consume it all. Apple did something similar with MobileMe: the backends are simple APIs, and the frontend is a thick, client-side application that handles much of the logic in real time. This enables more flexibility, more scalability, and more foresight, leading to better, more maintainable applications.

This approach of building many smaller services works especially well with Platform-as-a-Service. In fact, it is a best practice to do it this way with PaaS. Making small independent services that all tie together on the frontend is not only a modern approach to developing both web and mobile applications, but also ties in well when you are trying to decide how to incorporate a Platform-as-a-Service strategy.

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