By Shawn Millar
There are usually three concepts of cloud service, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Whether it is IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, each has its own intricacies, but today we're going to help you to differentiate SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
SaaS - Software-as-a-Service is generally charged depending upon the number of users and charges are recurring monthly or yearly. Companies have the choices to add or remove users at any time without additional costs. Some of the most well known SaaS solutions are Microsoft office365, SalesForce, Google Apps. It is a responsibility of SaaS provides to manage Server, Network, and Security related threat intern it supports organization to reduce the cost of software ownership by removing the need for technical staff to manage install, manage, and upgrade software, as well as reduce the cost of licensing software.
PaaS - Platform-as-a-Service, A cloud service, typically providing a platform on which software can be developed and deployed in short it provides a platform to the software developer.
PaaS decreases the amount of coding required, automates company policy and aids the migration of apps to hybrid clouds. With PaaS, users can better manage servers, storage, networking and operating systems in general. All apps built using PaaS include characteristics of the cloud, such as scalability, availability, and multi-tenancy. In addition, it is quicker and cheapens the process of creating, testing and launching apps.
PaaS is utilizing the infrastructure services and add software platform services to it. The basic idea is to help the application developer to his core strength and relive him from dealing with the application hosting platform. PaaS providers are more responsible for dealing with servers and their major role is to provide clients an environment in which the operating system and server software, as well as the server hardware and network infrastructure, are taken care of. This helps users to focus on the business side of scalability, and the application development of their product or service.
IaaS - Infrastructure-as-a-Service - A cloud service that enables users to get access to their own infrastructure - computers, networking resources, storage. These can be typically virtual resources but could be real, physical resources as well.
This is the most basic of the service offerings. The service provider has to take care of these devices or virtual machines including all their services they depend on, e.g. networking, hardware or operating system patches. This basic service is interesting for a number of uses especially for highly customized software which cannot work on PaaS or even cannot be fulfilled by SaaS. The disadvantage is that for this service the user must have appropriate experts for all lower level technologies like operating system and more. This kind of service offers a greater flexibility for any online software but also demands deeper a higher amount of technical skills in the different area.
Many IaaS providers now offer databases, messaging queues, and other services above the virtualization layer as well. Users get benefited with IaaS as they get bare metal infrastructure on top of which they can install any required platform.
With this article, we hope to outline what is Cloud computing, how we use it and how it can help our clients to get benefited from it.
Article Source: Comparision of SAAS, PAAS & IAAS