Part 12 - Building Robust Enterprise Systems: An Introduction to Essential Technologies (Understanding IaaS and PaaS

Written by : Vimal Panchal

Aug 02, 2023

5 like

In the world of cloud computing, you may often hear the terms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). These are essentially models of how you can use cloud resources, and understanding them can help you make the most of your cloud deployments.

What is IaaS?

Infrastructure as a Service, or IaaS, is a form of cloud computing that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS is one of the three main categories of cloud computing services, alongside Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

In an IaaS model, a third-party provider hosts hardware, software, servers, storage, and other infrastructure components on behalf of its users. IaaS providers also offer a range of services accompanying that infrastructure, such as detailed billing, monitoring, log access, security, load balancing, and clustering.

Why use IaaS?

IaaS can provide flexibility and scalability, and it has several other potential business benefits:

Elimination of Capital Expenditure

IaaS sidesteps the upfront expense of setting up and managing an on-site data center, making it an economical option for start-ups and businesses testing new ideas.
Scalability and Flexibility

IaaS enables businesses to scale up and down quickly in response to demand and provides the flexibility to try out new projects with minimal risk.

Example of IaaS

An example of IaaS would be renting VMs (Virtual Machines) from a provider like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. Instead of buying and maintaining your own physical servers, you're essentially renting a server in the cloud.

What is PaaS?

Platform as a Service, or PaaS, is a cloud computing model that delivers applications over the internet. In a PaaS model, a cloud provider delivers hardware and software tools to its users as a service. A PaaS provider hosts the hardware and software on its own infrastructure, freeing developers from having to install in-house hardware and software to develop or run a new application.

Why use PaaS?

Here are a few reasons why businesses might choose to use PaaS:

Simplified operations

With PaaS, the platform management is handled by the provider, allowing developers to focus on writing the code.
Faster time to market

PaaS provides a platform to deploy applications quickly, which means products can be delivered to the market faster.
Scalable

PaaS solutions automatically scale up and down to match the needs of your application.

Example of PaaS

An example of PaaS could be using a platform like Heroku or Google App Engine. These services provide a platform for developers to deploy and run their applications, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Let's explore some of the key IaaS and PaaS Technologies:

IaaS Technologies

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

This is Amazon's cloud platform, offering over 175 services from data centers globally. Services include computing power, storage options, networking, and databases.
Microsoft Azure

Azure is Microsoft's public cloud computing platform, providing a range of cloud services, including those for analytics, storage, and networking.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google's cloud platform offers services in computing, storage, and application development that run on Google hardware
IBM Cloud

This platform offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS through all its available cloud delivery models.
Oracle Cloud

Oracle's cloud platform offers IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and Data as a Service (DaaS).
Alibaba Cloud

This is a cloud computing service of Alibaba Group, providing a comprehensive suite of global cloud computing services.
DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is an American cloud infrastructure provider offering cloud services to help deploy, scale and automate modern applications.
Vultr

Vultr is a provider of high-performance SSD cloud servers that boasts a global footprint.
Linode

Linode is an American privately-owned cloud hosting company that provides virtual private servers.
VMware Cloud

This is a popular enterprise-grade IaaS platform that supports existing workloads as well as new application development.

PaaS Technologies

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

This is an orchestration service offered by Amazon Web Services for deploying applications that orchestrates various AWS services, including EC2, S3, Simple Notification Service (SNS), CloudWatch, autoscaling, and Elastic Load Balancers.
Google App Engine

This is a Platform as a Service and cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers
Microsoft Azure App Services

This is a fully managed platform for building, deploying, and scaling web apps.
Heroku

This is a cloud platform as a service supporting several programming languages.
IBM Cloud Foundry

IBM's PaaS provides a highly scalable, open-source cloud platform that allows you to build, run, and manage applications.
Oracle Cloud Platform

This is a comprehensive, integrated suite of services that make it easy for developers to build, deploy, and manage any type of application.
Red Hat OpenShift

This is a family of containerization software developed by Red Hat. It's an enterprise-grade platform based on Kubernetes.
Engine Yard

This is a platform as a service company that allows developers to plan, deploy and grow applications.
Salesforce App Cloud

This is Salesforce's PaaS offering that includes a suite of services and tools to develop apps that can be instantly deployed on the Salesforce servers.
SAP Cloud Platform

This is an enterprise service for building, extending, and integrating applications.

In the next part of the series, we will take a deep dive into CI/CD tools and Serverless architectures. Stay tuned!