Clearing the sky on Cloud Service Model Acronyms

Cloud computing has been around for a while now. It has been an integral part of many organizations in one form or another. In our day to day life we have been consuming and interacting with various cloud computing services like Gmail, Google Drive, Trello, Slack, Office 365, Netflix, Amazon prime etc. Just like any other IT space, cloud also has also had its fair share of jargons. With so many jargons and acronyms around cloud computing the whole concept can be a nebulous to most of us.

With so many cloud providers (GCP, Azure, Salesforce, AWS, G42, IBM Cloud, SAP etc.) claiming their share of market, the offerings are just getting more complex for customers to decipher. One of the fundamental and first step in terms of engaging with cloud is to understand the various service models offered by the cloud provider. Here is an attempt to demystify the acronyms related to few fundamental cloud service models:

With “Traditional Computing” organizations have been the owners and custodians of the computers, network, gateways, storage, cooling systems etc. Infrastructure was secured within the company premises and their data centers. This would imply the cost of procuring hardware, keeping up with latest updates/patches, security fixes, network outages, power failures, backup, maintenance etc. will be incurred by the company. Additional effort of hiring and managing IT staff only adds to the recurring cost for the organization. 

It is a known fact that to succeed in today’s economy organizations need to be very fluid and agile in terms of aligning with every emerging opportunity. With the overhead of managing infrastructure, the pace of keeping up with innovation becomes staggering and overwhelming. To exploit this opportunity cloud providers offer IAAS (Infrastructure as a service). Infrastructure as Service is the service model where cloud providers provide the Virtual hardware which replaces on-premises physical infrastructure!

Organizations no longer need to procure or maintain their physical infrastructure. If IAAS sounds magical than the secret lies in cloud providers doing the heavy lifting and hosting the machines (thousands and thousands of them!) in their own data centers spread across different geographical locations. Cloud service providers use lot of different technologies like Hypervisor to make sure that machines can be made available to you on demand! With IAAS offering, organizational users can spin off any Virtual Machine with required configuration within minutes! Out of all the service model, IAAS gives lot more control over the selection, configuration, performance and cost optimization of the overall infrastructure.

PAAS service model offers the infrastructure along with the software like Operating system, Web Servers, Software Development tools, Containers, Application servers etc. As part of PAAS offering, cloud service provider deals with the administration of underlying infrastructure to make sure the right versions of software, backups, security patches and updates are maintained on timely basis. 

Under PAAS service model most of the cloud provider give "out of the box" access to services like Message broker, application servers, Identity management for authentication and authorization, API management ,various flavors of database like SQL, NoSQL, Graph, Object etc. Companies can rent complete platforms for software development lifecycle ( like AzureDevOps )as part of the PAAS offering .PAAS enables developers to focus on building application designed specifically to take advantage of the characteristics of cloud services, such as scalability, flexibility, multi-location and shared resources. In short, PAAS service model enables organizations to focus on building business capabilities rather than focusing on managing the software and tools required to build, deploy and run the capabilities.

Many of the components and services offered as part of PAAS model have evolved through various outsourcing initiatives. CNFS (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) maintains a comprehensive repository of such emerging cloud native foundation components.

SaaS customers have no infrastructure or software to buy, install, maintain, or update. You can directly access the application as end user and start consuming it for your business needs. SAAS is an abstraction over PAAS. Under SAAS service model cloud provider manages hardware, Operating System, tools and even the business application/software. SAAS works based on subscription or pay as you go model.

Accessing mail service like Gmail or watching movies on Netflix are classic examples of consuming a service which is offered as part of SAAS service model. Other examples of SAAS service include Microsoft Office 365, DropBox, Slack, Google Aaps,  Google Aps, Concur, Zendesk, DocuSign, etc. With increasing popularity and usage of cloud services, there seem to be many more flavors of service models mushrooming in the cloud space; which are in one way or derived from the 3 fundamental models of IAAS, PAAS and SAAS. 

Other service models are named after the domain , sector or specialized service which they are tailored to provide. Following are few of the more specialized cloud service provider models emerging on the horizon:

BPAAS ( Business Process as a service ) provide services related to Business processes such as pay roll, IT Helpdesk. CAAS ( Communication as a service ) provides services like Voice over IP, instant messaging and Video collaboration. MLAAS ( Machine Learning as a service ) provide services to easily implement machine learning solutions. DBAAS ( Database as a service) provides out of the box SQL and NoSQL database related services. FAAS ( Function as a service ) provide infrastructure to run snippets of code called functions. A fair compilation of other such "AS (As a Service )" can be accessed through net as well.

Hope this attempt has helped to clear sky on few of the jargons related to various cloud service models. Next time you are discussing or exploring the best service model for your organization do not be shy to fire up this article as a quick refresher ;) :).