Over the last few years, there has been a recent surge of upward trend in aaS (as-a-Service).
In this article i am going to quickly review some of the most common “as-a-Service” within the Software Engineering/Development industry.
As a concept; aaS has been around for quite some time. “as a Service” is all about providing certain things (as a service) for consumers to consume (mainly via the internet).
IaaS — Infrastructure as a Service
IaaS is perhaps one of the main aaS out there within Software. It has been around for a while — arguably probably can be considered to be the very first as-a-Service offering. This offering is all about providing infrastructure resources as a service for end consumers to use.
For example; Amazon is one of the earlier providers of this with their AWS cloud offerings of giving end consumers to ‘provision’ — i.e. create infrastructure resources on demand.
Common infrastructure resources includes networking components (in AWS this is VPC — Virtual Private Cloud, Network Interfaces, Public IPs, Elastic IPs, Networking Gateways such as Transit Gateway and Internet Gateway, Routing Tables, Subnets & many more). Additionally, AWS provides virtual servers for consumers to consume in the form of EC2 instances.
There are many other providers of IaaS. For example, Google has their own cloud offering in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) where they provide what is known as “compute instances” which is basically virtual machines for people to use in addition to VPCs just like AWS do. Also, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Platform also provides on-demand virtual machines called Azure Virtual Machines. Azure of course also provide their own version of networking mainly in the form of VNet similar to AWS & GCPs VPC.
Adopting IaaS means the end consumer would require to manage the OS, Application, and Data that runs on the provided infrastructure.
PaaS — Platform as a Service
PaaS stands for Platform as a Service. As the name suggests; it is all about giving a “platform” for the end user to use.
PaaS requires less user management.
Typically the difference a PaaS has from an IaaS is that the cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure etc) manages the operating systems (OS), and the user is responsible for the applications and data they run and store.
