What is SaaS, PaaS and IaaS? With examples

Question

What do the following terms mean?

• SaaS
• PaaS
• IaaS?

There are various cloud services available today, such as Amazon's EC2 and AWS, Apache Hadoop, Microsoft Azure and many others. Which category does each belong to and why?

Answer 1

Difference between IaaS PaaS & SaaS

In the following tabular format we will be explaining the difference in context of

  pizza as a service 

Answer 2

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are cloud computing service models.

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), as the name suggests, provides you the computing infrastructure, physical or (quite often) virtual machines and other resources like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks etc.

  Examples: Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, Rackspace, Google Compute Engine.

• PaaS (Platform as a Service), as the name suggests, provides you computing platforms which typically includes operating system, programming language execution environment, database, web server etc.

  Examples: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos.

• While in SaaS (Software as a Service) model you are provided with access to application software often referred to as "on-demand software". You don't have to worry about the installation, setup and running of the application. Service provider will do that for you. You just have to pay and use it through some client.

  Examples: Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365.

Few additional points regarding your question:

1. AWS (Amazon web services) is a complete suite which involves a whole bunch of useful web services. Most popular are EC2 and S3 and they belong to IaaS service model.

2. Although Hadoop is based on previous works by Google(GFS and MapReduce), it is not from Google. It is an Apache project. You can find more here. It is just a distributed computing platform and does not fall into any of these service models, IMHO.

3. Microsoft's Windows Azure is again an example of IaaS.

As far as popularity of these services is concerned, they all are popular. It's just that which one fits into your requirements better. For example, if you want to have a Hadoop cluster on which you would run MapReduce jobs, you will find EC2 a perfect fit, which is IaaS. On the other hand if you have some application, written in some language, and you want to deploy it over the cloud, you would choose something like Heroku, which is an example of PaaS.

Answer 3

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are basically cloud computing segment.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - Infrastructure as a Service is a provision model of cloud computing in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components. The service provider owns the equipment and is responsible for housing, running and maintaining it. The client typically pays on a per-use basis. Ex- Amazon Web Services, BlueLock, Cloudscaling and Datapipe

PaaS (Platform as a Service) - Platform as a Service is one of the GROWING sector of cloud computing. PaaS basically help developer to speed the development of app, saving money and most important innovating their applications and business instead of setting up configurations and managing things like servers and databases. In one line I can say Platform as a service (PaaS) automates the configuration, deployment and ongoing management of applications in the cloud. Ex: Heroku, EngineYard, App42 PaaS and OpenShift

SaaS (Software as a Service) - Software as a Service, SaaS is a software delivery method that provides access to software and its functions remotely as a Web-based service. Ex: Abiquo's and Akamai

Answer 4

When you are a simple client who wants to make use of a software but you have nothing in hand then you use SaaS.

When you have a software developed by you, but you want to deploy and run on a publicly available platform then you use PaaS.

When you have the software and the platform ready but you want the hardware to run then you use IaaS.

Answer 5

IaaS (Infra as a Service)

IaaS provides the infrastructure such as virtual machines and other resources like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks etc. Infrastructure as service or IaaS is the basic layer in cloud computing model.

Common examples: DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco Metapod, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE) are some popular examples of Iaas.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)

PaaS or platform as a service model provides you computing platforms which typically includes an operating system, programming language execution environment, database, web server. technically It is a layer on top of IaaS as the second thing you demand after Infrastructure is a platform.

Common examples: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos.

SaaS (Software as a Service)

In a SaaS, you are provided access to application services installed at a server. You don’t have to worry about installation, maintenance or coding of that software. You can access and operate the software with just your browser. You don’t have to download or install any kind of setup or OS, the software is just available for you to access and operate. The software maintenance or setup or help will be provided by SaaS provider company and you will only have to pay for your usage.

Common examples: Google Apps, Microsoft office365, Google docs, Gmail, WHMCS billing software

Basic difference between IaaS, PaaS & SaaS

Answer 6

Meaning For dummies:

IAAS (Infrastructure As A Service) :

• The base layer

• Deals with Virtual Machines, Storage (Hard Disks), Servers, Network, Load Balancers etc

PAAS (Platform As A Service) :

• A layer on top of IAAS

• Runtimes (like java runtimes), Databases (like mySql, Oracle), Web Servers (tomcat etc)

SAAS (Software As A Service) :

• A layer on top on PAAS

• Applications like email (Gmail, Yahoo mail etc), Social Networking sites (Facebook etc)

To quickly relate consider the below Google's offerings:

IAAS : Google Compute Engine (One can develop programs to be run on high performing google's computing infrastructure)

PAAS : Google App Engine (One can develop applications and let them execute on top of Google app engine which take care of the execution)

SAAS : Gmail, Google+ etc (One can use email services and extend email/google+ based applications to form newer applications)

Popularity

Company Wise Popularity

Cloud computing is dominated by

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS),
2. Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine
3. Microsoft Azure
4. There are many small and medium scale cloud operators that include IBM, Oracle etc.

Most of the popularity around these services owe to the reputation of the company and the amount of investments being made by these companies around the cloud space.

Type of Service Wise Popularity

1. PAAS (Platform as a Service) is more popular among developers as they can put all their concentration on developing their apps and leave the rest of management and execution to the service provider. Many service providers also offer the flexibility to increase/decrease the CPU power depending upon the traffic loads giving developers cost effective and easy & effortless management.
2. SAAS (Software as a service) is more popular among with consumers, who bother about using the application such as email, social networking etc
3. IAAS (Infrastructure as a service) is more popular among users into research and high computing areas.