SaaS, PaaS, IaaS

Hello!

In this post, I want to present my views on the three cloud world jargons post explaining them to the audience who has a little about it. There are already many articles which explain them in detail. I am putting my perspective of it.

In today’s Technology world, Cloud computing is coming up in every aspect. Different vendors provide different kind of solutions on the cloud. Lets look at each of them.

Software As A Service (SaaS)

This is a distribution model from a specific vendor where the application / software is hosted in a cloud owned by the vendor and the end users are accessing the service. There are many applications SaaS out of which some are – Google Docs, Online Photo Editing (PIC Monkey, etc). Next question you might have is, these are simple applications but how these are SaaS? They are application that you normally need on your machine to work on like – creating excel sheets, word, editing images. What these SaaS’es are doing is giving you an online space and solution to work on from anywhere. That is exactly called SaaS.

Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS)

This is a distribution model from a specific vendor where the vendor provides core/basic infrastructure assets over the cloud. I am 100% sure that all of you have or are already using this cloud computing model. Any vendor can provide any infrastructure over cloud and make it accessible over network to the end user. How? Ok, lets see do you use Google Drive? I use it a lot. Now if you see, it is actually a disk drive storage provided to you over the cloud and is accessible over internet from anywhere. This is an infrastructure of type storage which Google is providing. Lets look at another great example. I am sure you know about bigdaddy, Hostgator, bigrock. For those who don’t these are vendors who provides domain to end users. I just bought a domain from Hostgator and they provide me a virtual Linux server, Database, PHP Server, MYSQL and lot of other services online which is accessible from anywhere. This is providing real infrastructure to end users without the need of buying all. Of-course, we need to pay some charges.

Product As A Service (PaaS)

This is a distribution model from a specific vendor where the vendor provides the fully functional product or stack over the cloud. The best example I can think of is “Amazon Web Services (AWS)”. This is whole bunch of products which are provided by AWS which are getting used by most of other service providers for ex. AppFog uses AWS. AWS consist of Computing, Content Delivery, Storage, Database, Deployment & Management, Application Services are more. I hope you get the idea. The Idea is to have a complete stack of integrated products to meet the demand of the end user.

Cloud Computing will have a major role to play in Media and Entertainment, Social collaboration. Media&Entertainment because more and more end users are driving towards online cloud storage and application for Media (Music and Videos). Social Collarobation because that is going to be one of the major need to B2B customer connecting internally and externally.

Lets see what will be next curve of Cloud Computing!

Please share your thoughts!