Cloud Business Model - All about IaaS PaaS and SaaS

On the Cloud Business Model, cloud and virtualization technologies speak for a long time, especially on the three most popular service models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In today's article we would like to revisit this issue and talk about the features and the applicability of cloud services.

Cloud Business Model

Stack cloud computing consists of three parts, each of which is a separate category of services. On the upper level is SaaS in fact, this cloud-based applications, access to which is provided via the web interface. This is followed by PaaS platform independent application development and deployment.

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The third level is located IaaS Servers, storage, network and computing infrastructure that the customer gets the use to launch their solutions. The described structure can be represented by the following scheme:

IaaS PaaS and SaaS

To demonstrate the three types of services often used the analogy with the pizza is a kind of "Pizza as a Service". When a customer orders a pizza and eat in the cafe or restaurant, it is of SaaS, as if ordering her to your house, it's PaaS. If he went to the store, bought the ingredients and prepare meals on their own, then we can say that this IaaS.

Now, a little dive into each of these technologies and will start from the end of the stack - IaaS.

What is IaaS

When choosing the IaaS, you get the servers, storage and network resources as a plug-in services. It turns out that the company acquires the computing resources of the supplier, avoiding the need to purchase their own hardware and maintain it. This service can be provided on the type of public cloud, private cloud , or a combined approach.

The concept of IaaS includes the following features:

• Resources is the service. Customer can at any time increase or decrease the amount of resources consumed
• Since physical resources are shared by many users due to the capabilities of virtualization
• Flexible payment model (e.g. option pay as you go, when the company only pays for the power consumed)

Considering all the above, you can determine when to use IaaS-solutions. Consult your IaaS is in the event that the company sometimes feels the need to increase capacity during spikes in demand that is, there is a need in the operational scale infrastructure.

Another option - the company is a start-up that does not have funds to purchase their own "iron" and its maintenance, or organization wants to run an experimental line of business and to purchase equipment that is not always appropriate (the project could not take off).

However, despite the flexibility and scalability of IaaS, technology has certain limitations. In this regard, there are situations where it is not recommended. For example, the company is a player in the regulated industry, which the rules do not permit the storage of data on servers not owned by the company.

Here I would like to add that there is an opinion, not worth the alleged use cloud solutions for business-critical applications. However, we note that it is not. Critical business applications can be deployed on a productive server with 16 cores and terabytes of memory in which the duplication of a number of components provided (including at higher levels).

What is PaaS

Platform as a Service, or the PaaS, simplifies the scanning application and management, while hiding inside work with servers, load balancing, the DNS, and others. Therefore, there is no need to hire engineers for the maintenance of the infrastructure. This allows developers to focus more on the development and deployment issues.

It should be noted, as PaaS is the second level of the pyramid of cloud services, it is based on the IaaS, but further reduces the time from idea generation to its implementation. This is achieved by greater process automation and abstraction from the hardware.

To abstract the concept of working with, it was done the following servers:

• Implemented build system that compiles and stores the code;
• Implemented data base management applications that monitors the version and metadata;
• Launched a scheduler that handles a large group of servers and run applications on multiple machines as one;
• The load balancer manages Internet traffic;
• DNS works for automated;
• Implemented form of containerization (FreeBSD Jail, Solaris Zones, Linux Containers), which prevents interference of one application to another job.

The first and last points - these are the elements that have contributed to the growing popularity of Docker. Linux the Container technology has long been part of the Linux kernel, but decided to automate their use only to large companies or PaaS-providers.

Companies use mikroservisy architecture and oriented to work with the software, because they offer the ability to automatically deploy and test code, as well as scaling, depending on the load. This functional and implements PaaS.

Unfortunately, this approach has one serious drawback. You pass the control of the peculiar black box and become dependent on it. However, otherwise, the company is constantly reinventing the wheel or starting to use the slow instruments.

A little bit about SaaS

In the case of SaaS customer gets the opportunity to use applications vendor, is performed in the cloud. Applications are available from a variety of client devices, such as through a browser. SaaS market grew by 21.7% to 38.9 billion US dollars in 2016. In 2017, the growth rate will only increase.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the last level of cloud computing, which often complements the PaaS, as can be seen from the scheme at the beginning of this article. This full-featured application for a user to perform certain functions, for example, work with images or sound. The most popular form of payment in this segment remains subscription.

In the case of SaaS in the cloud provider's area of responsibility transferred to the application configuration issues, monitoring and backup. Therefore, this model does not require a work team organization technician does everything provider.

Thus, the higher-level model you plan to use, the smaller the level of competence required by IT teams. Reverse is also true - the lower the level of IT maturity of your company, the more high-level model you need.