What does Platform as a Service (PaaS) provide in addition to infrastructure services?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. In addition to providing infrastructure services, PaaS includes hardware and operating system services, thereby facilitating the full stack development environment.

The inclusion of hardware means that PaaS offerings typically provide users with virtualized hardware resources, such as servers and storage, along with the necessary operating system. This allows developers to focus on building applications while the PaaS provider manages the infrastructure, including updates, scaling, and security of the operating system.

Other options do not align with what PaaS provides. Physical security is typically the responsibility of data centers rather than a direct service of PaaS. Domain registration services are not inherent to PaaS offerings either; they relate more to web hosting and domain providers. Finally, while PaaS supports software applications as part of its services, it is not limited only to software applications, since it also includes the necessary underlying hardware and operating system resources for application development and deployment.