What are the 3 main important acronyms used within cloud computing?

There are the three major service categories provided by cloud providers, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). It is important to understand the fundamentals and what the difference between them are because they will appear on various occasions where cloud computing services are discussed.

Let take a quick look at the three main services Azure offer: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

1. IaaS – (Infrastructure as a Service): As you can see in the image above, is the most flexible category of cloud services. IaaS products allow organizations to rent IT infrastructure and manage their business resources using Pay-as-you-Go for services such as their servers (virtual machines), compute, network, operating systems, data, storage and applications on the cloud.

2. PaaS – (Platform as a Service): requires less user management and does not provide access to the operating system. PaaS service allow businesses and developers to host, build, and deploy consumer-facing applications.

For example, the Azure Web Apps service provides an environment to host your web applications using code such as .net, java, PHP, Python and a few more. But you donot have access to the virtual machine and operating system. Also Azure SQL Dtabase is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) database engine that Microsoft handles most of the database management functions such as upgrading, patching, backups and monitoring without a user being involved.

3. SaaS – (Software as a Service): requires the least management and provides a complete software solution that you can purchase on a pay-as-you-go basis. Microsoft is responsible for managing everything and you just use the software. SaaS allows you to connect to and use applications over the internet.

When you implement a SaaS solution, as a user you are responsible for configuring the SaaS Solution, Common examples applications are Outlook email, calendar and Microsoft office 365 therefore SaaS offers both consumers and businesses cloud-based tools and applications for everyday use.

Examples of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Most businesses use a combination of IaaS and SaaS cloud computing service models, and many engage developers to create applications using PaaS.

IaaS examples: Azure virtual Machines, Azure Storage accounts

PaaS examples: Azure App Servcie, Azure SQL databases, Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Synapse analytics

SaaS examples: Outlook email, Calendar, Microsoft Office 365

Thank you for Reading! I hope this blog was helpful