Understanding Of Cloud Computing Services: The Meaning Of SaaS, PaaS And IaaS

When it comes to developing applications in the cloud we have to note that we will do so, as in the concept cloud there are different ways to do that we allow greater flexibility and simplicity when deploying our applications or maintain them. Among the different forms it can take the cloud servers which include: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Plataform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) .

SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE (SAAS)

The concept of SaaS has been around a long time, but maybe in the last few years we have clearly defined what we mean. Basically it is any web-based service. We have clear examples like Gmail Webmail, the CRM onlines. In this type of service we access through the browser normally unattended software. All development, maintenance, upgrades, backups are the responsibility of the supplier.

In this case we have little control, we find ourselves in the above the service layer. If the service provider is the responsibility falls to regain functionality.

Saas Popular examples are Google Docs, Salesforce , Dropbox , Gmail ...

PLATAFORM-AS-A-SERVICE (PAAS)

PaaS is where developers started to play and develop our own applications running in the cloud. In this case our only concern is to build our application, because the infrastructure gives us the platform.

This model greatly reduces the time complexity of deploying and maintaining applications and PaaS solutions that automatically manage scalability using more resources if necessary. Developers still have to worry that your applications are best possible optimized to consume less resources as possible (number of requests, disk writes, space required, processing time, etc. ..) But all this without going to the level of machines .

Popular examples are Google App Engine that allows to develop applications in Java or Python draping on infrastructure provided by Google, which also makes Heroku with Rails and Django.

For developers who ignore the infrastructure that must be assembled and just want to worry about writing software, this is the alternative to follow.

INFRASTRUCTURE-AS-A-SERVICE (IAAS)

In this case IaaS will have much more control than with PaaS, but in exchange for that we have to take care of infrastructure management,

The perfect example is provided by Amazon Web Service (AWS) that provides a range of services such as EC2 allows us to manage virtual machines in the cloud or S3 to use as storage. We can choose what type of instances we use LInux or Windows, as well as the memory or processor capacity of each of our machines. The hardware for us is clear, everything is handled virtually.

The main difference is that we take care of our applications scale according to our needs, and prepare all the setting on the machine (although there are instances images prepared with the most common configurations).