Yes, the acronyms can get daunting when used in a sentence. Here is a sentence to throw you off – I want my SaaS to run on a PaaS whose IaaS is AWS – which means I want my Software As A Service (SaaS) to run on a Platform As A Service (PaaS) whose Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) is Amazon Web Services (AWS). Yes, definitely a mouthful.
As if that is not enough there is also CaaS, FaaS and AIaaS. Yes, more are being conjured as you read this article.
Introduction
Everything is a service, which the consumer is charged depending on how many of the resources are being used. Computer hardware, infrastructure and software are becoming lucrative in a global market as services; and charging on usage basis.
In order to understand this alphabet soup of the cloud; let us take a different approach and start with an example which we can relate in our daily lives.
Before we get into definitions of the cloud, we must mention a few that existed for many decades before the cloud. They were modifications of the on-premise such as colocation which would be data centers for enterprise companies and hosting which is the physical servers are owned by a third party and enterprise companies use some resources of them.
Example
Owning a car is nice however, it has its’ own issues – maintenance, insurance, depreciation.
So well in order to cut down the depreciation and maintenance, we rent or lease a car, so we just drive the car and anytime we need a newer model we just return the old one and get the updated vehicle. However, we still pay insurance and gas and we still need to drive.
Assume we are not interested in driving and maintaining insurance premiums or maintenance even for a few years (as in a leasing a car), then we take a taxi or uber.
Finally , if we need to cut down the costs then we take the bus and share the cost with everyone. Updates happen automatically on the bus and we pay for some inconvenience as it is not door to door.
Using the transportation analogy let us co-relate with technology. Most companies own their own technology infrastructure (servers, network , databases etc ) and deploy their applications on it. This is termed as – on site premise – similar to owning a car.
The next level is to cut down costs and move towards co-location, i.e. let somebody own the infrastructure and we rent some servers from them and update or downgrade as needed. This is termed as Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) – similar to renting a car.
As we progress, we observe that Platform As A Service (PaaS) is analogous to taking an uber/taxi
Now gmail, yahoo mail etc. are considered as Software As A Service (SaaS). This is similar to taking the bus to get from point A to point B.
As can be seen above the responsibility of the customer (or user) is diminishing and finally at the taxi level it is just a service.
All of these acronyms IaaS, PaaS, SaaS make up the cloud. There are vendors like Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, who offer IaaS services for companies and individuals for a monthly price.
And more: CaaS, MaaS, FaaS, XaaS, AIaaS?
Ah! Come on! You are making these up.
Nope, here are the definitions
MaaS – Monitoring as a Service
Monitoring as a Service provides the option to offload a large majority of monitoring costs by having it run as a service as opposed to a fully invested in house tool.
CaaS – Communication as a Service
Communication as a Service, enables the consumer to utilize Enterprise level VoIP, VPNs, PBX and Unified Communications without the costly investment of purchasing, hosting and managing the infrastructure.
FaaS – Function as a Service
Function as a Service provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure. AWS has lambda and Google has its’ own method of creating functions.
AIaaS – Artificial Intelligence as a Service
Artificial Intelligence is being offered by all the big cloud vendors like Google’s language translator, AWS with deep learning etc.
Now let me make it confusing with CaaS. Another definition for CaaS is:
CaaS – Container as a Service
Container as a Service is a form of container-based virtualization in which container engines, orchestration and the underlying compute resources are delivered to users as a service from a cloud provider. Some examples are Google Container Engine(GKE), AWS (ECS), Azure (ACS) and Pivotal (PKS).
XaaS – A(X)nything as a Service
Anything(X) as a Service is the delivery of IT as a Service through hybrid Cloud computing and refers to either one or a combination of Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS). communications as a service (CaaS) or monitoring as a service (Maas).
XaaS is quickly emerging as a term that is being readily recognized as services that were previously separated on either private or public Clouds are becoming transparent and integrated.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to say that as we move into a world when all of the servers, applications etc are becoming services the picture for all these services (some services?) is shown below:
As I said there will be more and recently, BaaS – Backend as a Service!.
Further Reading & References
Some of the URLs I have used are given below for further reading:
- https://medium.com/@nnilesh7756/what-are-cloud-computing-services-iaas-caas-paas-faas-saas-ac0f6022d36e
- https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudy-concepts-iaas-paas-saas-maas-caas-xaas/
- https://mse238blog.stanford.edu/2017/07/ramdev10/artificial-intelligence-as-a-service-aiaas-on-cloud-promising-next-industrial-revolution/
- https://medium.com/@nnilesh7756/what-are-cloud-computing-services-iaas-caas-paas-faas-saas-ac0f6022d36e
One thought on “Cloud – IaaS, PaaS & SaaS! And More”
Thank you for your post, and i suppose it helps me a lot.