Everything you need to know about providers in cloud computing

What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet. Large clouds, predominant today, often have functions distributed over multiple locations from central servers. If the connection to the user is relatively close, it may be designated an edge server.

Cloud services are categorized as :

o Software-as-a-service (SaaS)

o Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

o Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

They are called ‘as a service’ because businesses purchase them as service products from third parties. Together, they are the cloud computing stack.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS, otherwise known as Software as a Service, is a popular business model in which companies host and license their software from a cloud-based server on a subscription basis. It’s currently in a boom period, but actually dates back to the 1960s. Sixty years ago, very few businesses could afford to buy and maintain computers and servers. Instead, they would connect their monitors to a centralized server where they could subscribe to the services they needed. Now, all users have to do is connect to the internet, open their web browser and then type in the software application’s URL. Upon logging in, they will have full access to all its features and any stored data. No wonder it’s proven so popular.

As SaaS continues to help businesses and individuals work more efficiently, the world has taken notice. By 2022, the SaaS market is expected to reach $164.29 billion, according to Transparency Market Research. Emerging SaaS-funding companies are also indicative of this rapidly growing market. To help underscore the rush, I’ve broken down some of the key innovations that have made SaaS such an attractive option.

Accessibility

Thanks to SaaS’s remote accessibility, you no longer have to purchase an application from a retail store, download it on your electronic device and then install it. With SaaS, you can have full access to the software’s features whenever you want it. Business owners, entrepreneurs and other individuals can easily collaborate through the software and be fully aware of what’s going on. If they have access to the internet, they can get to work.

Up-to-Date Software

Since SaaS providers are the ones maintaining and servicing their software (lest they churn subscribers), users no longer have to worry about keeping their applications up to date. Many software companies would have achieved this previously by releasing new versions of their software, on CD, every year or so. Now, everyone gets their updates at the same time.

Affordability

Although one must be on the lookout for hidden costs when starting a SaaS subscription, you are likely to save money by never having to pay for installation fees or fix bugs. You’re also likely to have more options for the type of features and packages you would sign up for. Upgrades are simple and can be initiated at any time, so you can always make use of them later.

Ease-of-Use

One of the greatest benefits of SaaS is that it’s easy to use. For any SaaS software to be widely adopted, it has to have a short learning curve and a well-designed interface. To be more specific, the interface, features and all other components need to be clearly mapped out for a novice to be able to learn quickly, either by intuition or ollowing clear guides and tutorials. This all stems from the subscription-based model. If a SaaS business wants to keep you as a subscriber, they will have to impress you far quicker than a business selling traditional software packages.

Employee-Focused

Cloud computing offers better communications, training and project management throughout a typical business. Senior management can now manage projects in a transparent manner while being able to communicate effectively with both local and remote employees. This in turn allows companies to look further afield when finding new talent.

Marketing

SaaS has helped proliferate automated marketing software. Even the smallest of startups can now utilize free trials of SaaS products to help optimize their marketing efforts (although some people warn against using cheaper plans). Not only can businesses automate their marketing campaigns, but they can also plan, execute and track their campaigns from an accessible interface. The different subscription plans offered by many marketing applications have made this kind of software more affordable because marketing SaaS applications now hope to scale their subscriptions as you scale your company.

Security

SaaS providers will deliver the same version of the software to thousands of users. This means that there will be a heavy investment into security which would be very expensive to achieve independently for a locally installed application. Generally, SaaS will be run across multiple data centers providing full redundancy in case one goes down and will have continuous data backups. SaaS will include the latest security protocols, SLAs for uptime and complete separation of data to satisfy data privacy policies. Security was always the biggest concern with SaaS adoption, however, this should no longer be an issue.

Flexibility

Working from any location is becoming the norm for businesses today. This rise in flexible working requires flexible tools to support it. SaaS allows businesses to have this ability. There are many benefits to a business including convenience for staff, reduction in office space/workstations and the option to employ homeworkers in key geographies.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a type of cloud computing offering in which a service provider delivers a platform to clients, enabling them to develop, run, and manage business applications without the need to build and maintain the infrastructure such software development processes typically require. PaaS and serverless computing services typically charge only for compute, storage, and network resources consumed.

PaaS technologies

PaaS includes multiple underlying cloud infrastructure components, including servers, networking equipment, operating systems, storage services, middleware, and databases.

All of these technology offerings are owned, operated, configured, and maintained by the service providers. These fully managed infrastructure services not only relieve the customer of the IT administrative burden, but also present an attractive financial argument for customers. They can avoid having to lay out investments in these foundational IT components that they might not be able to use to the fullest extent possible.

PaaS also includes resources such as development tools, programming languages, libraries, database management systems, and other tools from the cloud provider.

PaaS examples

Among the leading PaaS providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, IBM, Salesforce.com, Red Hat, Pivotal, Mendix, Oracle, Engine Yard, and Heroku. Most widely used languages, libraries, containers, and related tools are available on all the major PaaS providers’ clouds.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a PaaS offering for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed, run, and scaled automatically across multiple servers.

Development tools

PaaS vendors offer a variety of tools that are necessary for software development, including a source code editor, a debugger, a compiler, and other essential tools. These tools may be offered together as a framework. The specific tools offered will depend on the vendor, but PaaS offerings should include everything a developer needs to build their application.

Middleware

Platforms offered as a service usually include middleware, so that developers don’t have to build it themselves. Middleware is software that sits in between user-facing applications and the machine’s operating system; for example, middleware is what allows software to access input from the keyboard and mouse. Middleware is necessary for running an application, but end users don’t interact with it.

Operating systems

A PaaS vendor will provide and maintain the operating system that developers work on and the application runs on.

Databases

PaaS providers administer and maintain databases. They will usually provide developers with a database management system as well.

Infrastructure

PaaS is the next layer up from IaaS in the cloud computing service model, and everything included in IaaS is also included in PaaS. A PaaS provider either manages servers, storage, and physical data centers, or purchases them from an IaaS provider.

Faster time to market

PaaS is used to build applications more quickly than would be possible if developers had to worry about building, configuring, and provisioning their own platforms and backend infrastructure. With PaaS, all they need to do is write the code and test the application, and the vendor handles the rest.

One environment from start to finish

PaaS permits developers to build, test, debug, deploy, host, and update their applications all in the same environment. This enables developers to be sure a web application will function properly as hosted before they release, and it simplifies the application development lifecycle.

Price

PaaS is more cost-effective than leveraging IaaS in many cases. Overhead is reduced because PaaS customers don’t need to manage and provision virtual machines. In addition, some providers have a pay-as-you-go pricing structure, in which the vendor only charges for the computing resources used by the application, usually saving customers money. However, each vendor has a slightly different pricing structure, and some platform providers charge a flat fee per month.

Ease of licensing

PaaS providers handle all licensing for operating systems, development tools, and everything else included in their platform

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. It’s one of the four types of cloud services, along with software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and serverless.

IaaS quickly scales up and down with demand, letting you pay only for what you use. It helps you avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other datacenter infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate service component, and you only need to rent a particular one for as long as you need it. A cloud computing service provider, such as Azure, manages the infrastructure, while you purchase, install, configure, and manage your own software — operating systems, middleware, and applications.

Typical things businesses with IaaS include:

Test and development. : Teams can quickly set up and dismantle test and development environments, bringing new applications to market faster. IaaS makes it quick and economical to scale up dev-test environments up and down.

Website hosting : Running websites using IaaS can be less expensive than traditional web hosting.

Storage, backup and recovery : Organisations avoid the capital outlay for storage and complexity of storage management, which typically requires a skilled staff to manage data and meet legal and compliance requirements. IaaS is useful for handling unpredictable demand and steadily growing storage needs. It can also simplify planning and management of backup and recovery systems.

Web apps : IaaS provides all the infrastructure to support web apps, including storage, web and application servers and networking resources. Organisations can quickly deploy web apps on IaaS and easily scale infrastructure up and down when demand for the apps is unpredictable.

High-performance computing : High-performance computing (HPC) on supercomputers, computer grids or computer clusters helps solve complex problems involving millions of variables or calculations. Examples include earthquake and protein folding simulations, climate and weather predictions, financial modeling and evaluating product designs.

Big data analysis : Big data is a popular term for massive data sets that contain potentially valuable patterns, trends and associations. Mining data sets to locate or tease out these hidden patterns requires a huge amount of processing power, which IaaS economically provides.

Data centers, availability zones, and regions

To promote greater availability and resiliency of resources, most cloud providers today offer a hierarchy around how workloads map to physical and virtual infrastructure as well as geography.

Four Benefits of IaaS :

Greater Reliability

The on-demand service model makes it easy to migrate workloads from one IaaS instance to another, ensuring that resources are always there when you need them.

Greater Security

IaaS providers maintain state-of-the-art security postures as core elements of their business models.

DevOps Support

Test, dev and operations teams gain immediate access to infrastructure to greatly speed up development and support operations.

Business Focus

By removing IT as a cost center in the enterprise, organizations can devote more time and energy to their core business models.

IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS

The easiest and most common way of understanding the distinction between the coarse grained -aaS categories of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS is typically by understanding which elements of the stack are managed by the vendor and which are managed by the end user.

In a traditional IT setting, it is up to the end user to manage the whole stack end-to-end, from the physical hardware for servers and networking, up through virtualization, operating systems, middleware, and so on.

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS each offer a progressive layer of abstraction after that. IaaS abstracts away the physical compute, network, storage, and the technology needed to virtualize those resources. PaaS goes a step further and abstracts away the management of the operating system, middleware, and runtime. SaaS provides the entire end-user application as-a-Service, abstracting away the entire rest of the stack.

SaaS examples : BigCommerce, Google Apps, Salesforce, Dropbox, MailChimp, ZenDesk, DocuSign, Slack, Hubspot.

PaaS examples : AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, Windows Azure (mostly used as PaaS), Force.com, OpenShift, Apache Stratos, Magento Commerce Cloud.

IaaS examples : AWS EC2, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Digital Ocean, Magento 1 Enterprise Edition*.

When to Use SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

The key advantages of these three services follow from the benefits of working in the cloud. These solutions differ from traditional hosting by providing dynamic scaling and variable billing through distributed resources. Dynamic scaling means that demand for computing resources is available immediately. For example, cloud solutions can cope with sudden large traffic surges on a website. In contrast with scale traditional hosting capacity, new hardware or software may need to be acquired and installed, which may take days instead of minutes or seconds. Dynamic scaling is possible through a cloud vendor’s large distributed network of computing resources. Further, consumers only pay what they use, allowing for more cost-effective spend.

On the other hand, the fact that cloud services are hosted via the Internet on third party infrastructure possess an inherent security disadvantage. Sensitive information that external parties cannot handle whether because of internal security policies or public legislation, is not suitable for a third party cloud stack.

Another implication is that critical processes, where continuous operation is required, cannot afford the risk of downtime caused by either the Internet provider or cloud vendor, no matter how short. There are also boundaries on customisability and control as opposed to a stack created entirely in-house. Finally, the process of changing vendors or moving a solution back in-house can be very expensive and time-consuming.

Nevertheless, a third party cloud service will be appropriate in many situations. Consider using SaaS products for solutions for everyday business needs such as email and collaborative software. SaaS products are also useful if you need short-term solutions where the time to develop such solutions in-house is not justified, or if you need web applications that are likely to face unpredictable surges. If multiple developers are working on the same project from different organisations, locations or teams, PaaS solutions may be better suited. Enterprises may consider IaaS products where there are significant fluctuating demands for computing resources, concerns with scaling hardware or where there is need to move spending from capital to operating expenditure.

SaaS applications are designed for end-users and delivered over the web.

PaaS is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying those applications quick and efficient.

IaaS is the hardware and software that powers it all, including servers, storage, networks, and operating systems

References :

https://www.service-architecture.com/articles/cloud-computing/cloud_computing_categories.html

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/understanding-the-cloud-computing-stack-saas-paas-iaas/

https://www.service-architecture.com/articles/cloud-computing/infrastructure_as_a_service_iaas.html

https://www.service-architecture.com/articles/cloud-computing/software_as_a_service_saas.html

https://www.service-architecture.com/articles/cloud-computing/platform_as_a_service_paas.html