IaaS, PaaS, SaaS. What's the difference?
Why Do We Need a Cloud Service?
let’s say you’re a business and you want to host your own application on your own servers, you’ll have to buy physical servers, set them up and worry about all the configurations like the network, the OS, the software , ect … This is what we call an os-premise IT infrastructure.
An easier way would be to use a cloud computing service (called “aaS” or “as-a-Service”) provided by a third party, we have three main types:
The Three Type of Cloud Services :
1- IaaS or “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” :?
Here the service provider we’ll take care of Storage, Networking, Servers and virtualization on the cloud. This way you don’t have to worry about maintaining a physical server, and also you only pay for the resources you need and you can scale up and down as needed.
But you are still responsible for the OS, Middleware, Runtime, and your Applications and Data. you can access and manage your data through a dashboard connected to the provider’s API.
It's mainly used by companies to test or develop programmes, as well as taking care of storage, backups and recovery.
As an example : Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft azure.
2- PaaS or “Platform-as-a-service” :
Here the service provider takes care of everything except for your application and data.
meaning developers and programmers could focus on developing, running and managing their apps without having to install an entire infrastructure running that process.?
example: google app Engine, or Heroku
3- SaaS or “Software-as-a-service” :
it’s the most popular form of cloud computing services. Here the service provider will do everything for you from delivering an entire application to maintaining and managing its infrastructure.??
SaaS is highly scalable and it saves a lot of time and effort but it could be quite expensive.
exemple : DropBox, HubSpot.