When going through cloud computing literature, quite often you will hear the term IaaS, SaaS, PaaS etc. What exactly are these ?
These are basically different types of Cloud Computing Services. These are also referred to as Cloud Computing Service Models.
IaaS – This is short for Infrastructure as a Service. IaaS is about delivering cloud computing infrastructure – compute, storage and network. Some examples of IaaS are IBM Softlayer, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace, ESDS eNlight Cloud, Netmagic SimpliCloud among others.
SaaS – This is short for Software as a Service. SaaS is about delivering software applications over the internet. Some well known examples of SaaS are Google Gmail, Google Docs, and Microsoft 365. Lots of enterprise applications from major vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc are now delivered as SaaS.
PaaS – This is short for Platform as a Service. PaaS is about delivering application development platforms over the internet. It also provides add-ons like services for testing, deployment and maintenance of the applications. PaaS provides the developers with suitable version of the run-times, operating systems, databases, middlewares etc that are required for application development and hosting. Some well known examples of PaaS are Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce Heroku and Google App Engine.