Cloud Service Types - XaaS (anything as a service)

Table of Contents

As a service

  1. Something that we usually have to buy - but we can rent it for a short time
  2. No commitments (or many commitment options)
  3. Pay for what we use (time, GB, or other)
  4. Cloud provider takes care of buying, developing, and maintaining it

e.g. renting a car instead of purchasing car can be called “car as a service”.

Service models

There are many of them. But the three “primary” standard service models are

  1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
    1. Cloud service providers have an opportunity to provide more than just the “basic” infrastructure
    2. PaaS includes a service layer on top of IaaS - computing, storage and networking
    3. Middleware, development tools, database server, and more
    4. We are free from worrying about the server VM itself or the hard disk itself
    5. Examples
      1. PaaS Computing:
        1. Azure App Services; Simply upload your code and configuration to Azure, and it runs your code wihtout needing to worry about the VM underneath; Includes scaling features, CI/CD, containers, staging and development environments, etc.
        2. CloudFoundry
        3. Heroku
        4. EngineYard
        5. Google App Engine
        6. AWS Elastic Beanstalk
      2. PaaS Storage: Managed Storage, Azure SQL Database
      3. PaaS Networking: Azure Front Door, Load Balancer, Firewall; Software applications that perform networking tasks.
  3. Software as a Service (SaaS)

Reading material

  1. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/definition/XaaS-anything-as-a-service
  2. https://www.ibm.com/topics/iaas-paas-saas
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_a_service

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