Cloud 101
What is the cloud? Simply, the cloud is a network of services, from computing to storage to countless others, that run on the Internet. The cloud is what allows you to stream content from Netflix, check your Gmail account, and Zoom with friends and family, all without hosting any of those services or storing that data locally on your own device.
Cloud services are hosted by public cloud providers. According to Statista, Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads these providers with 33% of overall market share in 2021, followed by other major players like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
To understand cloud computing, it’s important to distinguish between 3 major types: SaaS, IaaS, PaaS.
What is SaaS?
SaaS, or Software as a Service, is simply a way for users to connect to and use cloud-based services over the Internet. Before the cloud, software had to be manually downloaded and maintained and typically required paying a one-time license fee – think back to the days when installing Microsoft Office meant purchasing and downloading the software off of physical disks. Today, Microsoft Office has moved to a SaaS model where users pay on a subscription basis, and download the software from the cloud. Another benefit of SaaS is users can receive near continuous updates to their software via the cloud, instead of waiting for a new patch or version to be approved and physically released.
What is IaaS?
IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, is a form of cloud computing where users or companies can rent compute or memory resources in the cloud, instead of physically owning and maintaining their own machines and data centers. IaaS includes popular services like AWS’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) or S3 (Simple Storage Service). IaaS allows companies the ability to scale services easily and quickly to fit their growing business needs, often paying for resources using an “on-demand” model that is much more affordable and flexible.
What is PaaS?
PaaS, or Platform as a Service, is a model of cloud computing that sits between SaaS and IaaS.
With PaaS products, developers focus on their application-specific logic and data, while the platform provides infrastructure, monitoring, operating system, and other resources. An example of a PaaS product is the Google App Engine. An example of a PaaS product is AWS Lambda, a service that lets you run your code via functions, without worrying about application maintenance like logging, monitoring, resource provisioning, or scaling.