Types Of Cloud Services

It's really understanding the difference between the types of "as a service." If you look on the far left, the On-premises, there are these key layers to providing services.And On-premises I do everything. I'm managing the network devices, the cables, the SANs, the storage, the servers, my virtualization layer be it Hyper-V or ESX or Zen, whatever it is, and then manage the operating systems inside those virtual machines. If I'm using middleware and runtimes, I'm managing those. Which versions do I need? I need to upgrade that. I'm managing and backing up and protecting the data; I'm deploying the application. I do everything. So, that's On-premises. And while I'm going to focus on you don't have to manage parts of these other types of as a service, realize that as an IT organization, I could offer these as a service things within my own company and host it internally if I wanted to. It's just typically we see these as the main types of a public cloud solution. So On-premises, orange, you do everything. Infrastructure as a service. So notice now those bottom four layers, someone else is managing; the vendor of your infrastructure as a service. Microsoft, when I think about Azure and their IAS solution. They're worried about the networking, the storage, the servers and the virtualization layer. I see none of that. What I get is a service and for infrastructure what I get is a VM. Now inside that VM, I'm still managing the operating system. I'm still managing the middlewares and the runtimes, the data, and the app. But I'm not worried about or posting infrastructure elements anymore. Now there are things that Microsoft might do in Azure IS to help. They have an agent. It can integrate with Azure Backup to backup your VM. They have by their agent the ability to do PowerShell to push malware definition updates in. They can run PowerShell DSE or share for packets. They do things to help; you're not totally on your own, but from a responsibility perspective, that's all you. You manage the OS with inside the VM, but with that comes great flexibility.

I can do all that various stuff. Let me jump over one. Platform as a service, and this is how Azure actually started. Now the vendor is also managing the O/S inside those VMS and the middleware, and the runtime. All I worry about is writing my app and again I follow those basic rules for the PAS platform and my data, that's it. In my Visual Studio I say hey, deploy this app I've written to Azure. I want 20 instances of it, I want 5. It takes care of everything else. It can scale that thing for me. All I focus on is my app. I'm not worried about patching operating systems or anything else anymore. I focus on my app. That's my laser focus. Then all the while at the end is software as a service. The vendor manages everything.

In Office 365, we had a great example of this. I am not worried about the app or the data anymore; they're making sure it's highly available. They're backing it up, they're upgrading Exchange and SharePoint and Lync (SFB) and everything else. I just consume the service. And when I think about what's most desired, I start from the right. If I as a company can get _____ as a software as a service,

fantastic! That's what I'm going to do. It is not available as software as a service, maybe it's saying customer, I'm writing in my company,

well write it as PAS, unless you love patching and worrying about VMS. If it's an older solution or the vendor doesn't support it as PAS, then I run it as IAS and there's a VM in the cloud, but that's my preference. Ironically, the way you get into the cloud is often the opposite.We start with IAS because it's familiar. I understand VMS, this is just a VM in the cloud. So it's a great way to get into the cloud, but longer term, you kind of want to try and get into those other PAS and the SAS solutions.