Explain *aaS and other variants Like I'm Five
endan

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Explain *aaS and other variants Like I'm Five

Publish Date: Jan 13 '18
20 7

____ as a Service, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, etc. What are they? Are there something common between them?

Comments 7 total

  • Dian Fay
    Dian FayJan 13, 2018

    The common part is the "as a service", which means that whatever you're buying, someone else is contracting to maintain it so you don't have to. With *aaS it is common for the vendor to make certain guarantees regarding uptime, how long it'll take them to address outages or issues, and so on. This is called a "service level agreement" or SLA.

    Software as a service: I sell you a license to use an instance of my application (say, an issue tracker or webmail). You log in and set things up for your organization. I own the servers. If you have a problem that you can't fix through whatever admin UI you have access to, you have to go through my support team.

    Platform as a service: I sell you a license to build and deploy applications that work in my cloud. You write some code that hooks into my APIs and set up some of the environment in a controlled manner, like spinning up a database server with Amazon RDS. I own the cloud and everything you're talking to. If something goes wrong on the hardware end or if you blow up your software development community site by triggering a deploy cascade (😉) you have to go through my support team.

    Infrastructure as a service: I sell you a license to use my virtualization framework. You log in and spin up virtual servers, volumes, and networks, and administer them how you like. I own the host machines. If there's a network outage or a meteor hits the data center, fixing it is on me, but if you wipe your own database I don't care. Also, I'm Google or Amazon because you have to be huge for this to make sense as a business model.

    • endan
      endanJan 13, 2018

      So they are just buzzwords after all. 😂 The first paragraph explains it all. Thanks! (When you deploy just right 😆👌 p.s. love you Ben)

    • Valentin Silvestre
      Valentin SilvestreJan 15, 2018

      You can add the Function As A Service part ?

      • Dian Fay
        Dian FayJan 15, 2018

        FaaS is comparable to PaaS except your application is "serverless", so instead of deploying a running application into my cloud you're building your backend by tying my APIs together with your own code snippets that fire when invoked. Rob Conery's NDC Oslo 2017 talk gets into this: youtube.com/watch?v=BmZhSS40yAMf

        • Valentin Silvestre
          Valentin SilvestreJan 16, 2018

          Tbh I knew about it but it was good to add it for others people :)

          • Dian Fay
            Dian FayJan 16, 2018

            Nothing stopping you from adding to the list yourself! :)

            • Valentin Silvestre
              Valentin SilvestreJan 16, 2018

              My english is bad and the comprehension of the subject is important, I can't describe it as you do. :)

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