Pizza as a Service 2.0
Paul Kerrison
Director of Engineering, Quality and Architecture at Dunelm | Technologist | Innovator | Leader
Recently I was trying to describe the various types of cloud services available for modern IT deployment. Like many, I resorted to an analogy - the ever popular "Pizza as a Service".
However, the more I tried to use it, the more strained it became - my main difficulties were:
- The elements intuitively thought of as infrastructure Eg Oven, Electric / Gas and Dining Table were not provided by Infrastructure as a Service.
- The benefit of Platform as a Service is that all the "mundane" stuff is taken care of, giving you the space to concentrate on creating great applications. In this analogy, surely that's the pizza itself - not the drinks and eating surface...
- With Software as a Service, the vendor appears to manage everything - so there's nothing left for you to do. In reality, you would normally need to configure the product (even if that's just choosing your email address or background image)
- It also excludes some important new additions to the aaS family - in particular Functions as a Service
Not being one to overthink things(!), I decided to redraw the graphic including some recent aaSes and what I consider to be more appropriate elements to highlight the differences.
Without further ado, I give you - Pizza as a Service 2.0
Now for the justifications...
- On-Premises - like a homemade pizza, made from scratch, you do everything yourself (no change so far). Example: Datacentre
- Infrastructure as a Service - You share a kitchen with others. The utilities and oven are provided, but you make and cook the pizza yourself. Example: EC2, AVM
- Containers as a Service - You bring the pizzas but someone else uses their facilities and cooks the pizza for you. Example: ECS, ACS
- Platform as a Service - You order a pizza for collection, the pizzeria make and cook the pizza using their facilities. Example: App Engine
- Function as a Service - You go to a pizzeria with some friends. You order and then eat pizza made by the restuarant. You order drinks from the bar and they're made for you. Example: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google cloud Functions
- Software as a Service - You go to someone's house for a party, they provide the pizza and invite others round for you to meet. Conversation with the guests is still your responsibility! Example: Gmail, O365 Exchange Online
For the more technically minded, I've added the levels of abstraction at the side so you can see what I was thinking from an actual implementation point of view. The one that's probably slightly contentious is the scaling level. I was trying to use this to highlight the difference between PaaS and Faas ie with PaaS you still have to worry about how to manage scaling Eg how many dynos (Heroku) do you want to run.
Hopefully that makes more sense and is easier to use when trying to explain the differences...
...or maybe I've just overthought this a bit
Either way, I welcome your comments / thoughts and suggested improvements!
Originally posted on my blog: Pizza as a Service 2.0
??Sales Consultant and Coach??Heels to Deals CoAuthor??Women in Sales Champion??Supporter of Continued Learning and Growth??Believer that We ARE Stronger Together and that You Don’t Have to Do It Alone??
3 年Hi Paul, I absolutely LOVE this! I am going to DM you as well, I want to discuss your model if you are game. #pizzaasaservice
Software Engineer | Python, SQL, MERN
4 年Could you justify how Gmail is the best example for SaaS? My understanding sticks with it as an exclusive conversation application but not an entire system which gets the work (eg. platform where apps are also created) is done. Enlighten me.
Full-stack Developer
4 年Functin As A Service could I be a slice.
PMO du COO Orange Middle East Africa
7 年Maxime Wabartha
Retired Enterprise Architect and Information and Content Management Expert
7 年Paul, honestly, i'm glad i kept reading after the Pizza-aaS 1.0 analogy. I wasn't sure if i had just been "semi-retired" for tool long, or the world had gone bass-ackwards in the mean time ;-) Fortunately, you jumped right into the very reasons the chart was the reverse of reality. The Pizza-aaS 2.0 was much better and afforded me the opportunity to return to sanity. Enjoyed the thought experiment, well done! Some things to think about for your next one... DBaaS (database as a service), ingredients are the data, and the off-prem freezers for storing your ingredients are the DBaaS? Your container as a service took a different tact. And, just for grins, where might we fit on-prem cloud services -- one of the last environments I worked with had an internal cloud hosting service which provided on-prem IaaS and DBaaS for consumption by application groups in the company. Maybe that's a frat-house with a shared kitchen? Nah, maybe too convoluted... But, if you want to get tricky... hybrid cloud ;-) -- take-and-bake model, they make a basic pizza, you take it home add some exotic extra ingredients, and warm it up in your private oven? Ah, just tossing out kitchen sinks... again, liked the analogy, keep up the "overthinking," it's fun. Can't wait for 3.0!