As a web application developer, you've had only a few options in the past 20 years: shared web hosting (easy but slow and unreliable) or dedicated web hosting (hard and unreliable). Platform as a service (PaaS) not only gives you a new option, it offers the best of both worlds as an easy, fast, reliable, and scalable solution. Among other advantages, this book will give you: An explanation of the confusion between core cloud technology vs cloud-powered apps like Gmail, Dropbox, etc Real life PaaS case studies A lesson of the tradeoffs between portable and non-portable PaaS systems Code examples of app changes An overview of mobile apps on PaaS