SaaS,Paas and IaaS

Namaskar,

Good Morning,
In dreams was looking and moving some clouds from here and there to in morning decide to blog for the word clod. which is very burning and interesting topic at present. So many cloud service providers are there in market, delivering their services and support. Before discussing on technical part, should understand more about cloud
1. what is cloud concept (theoretical and technical part)
2. what terms are their
3. what is best for business

SaaS, PaaS and IaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS)

The top layer of cloud computing, Software as a Service is typically built on top of a Platform as a Service solution, whether that platform is publicly available or not, and provides software for end-users such as email, word processing, or a business CRM. Software as a Service is typically charged on a per-user and per-month basis, and companies have the flexibility to add or remove users at any time without addition costs beyond the monthly per-user fee. Some of the most well known SaaS solutions are “Google Apps”, Salesforce.com, and Microsoft’s “Business Productivity Online Suite

Characteristics of SaaS

Like other forms of Cloud Computing, it is important to ensure that solutions sold as SaaS in fact comply with generally accepted definitions of Cloud Computing. Some defining characteristics of SaaS include;

• Web access to commercial software

• Software is managed from a central location

• Software delivered in a “one to many” model

• Users not required to handle software upgrades and patches

• Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allow for integration between different pieces of software

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Operating at the layer above raw computing hardware, whether physical or virtual, PaaS provides a method for programming languages to interact with services like databases, web servers, and file storage, without having to deal with lower level requirements like how much space a database needs, whether the data must be protected by making a copy between 3 servers, or distributing the workload across servers that can be spread throughout the world. Typically, applications must be written for a specific PaaS offering to take full advantage of the service, and most platforms only support a limited set of programming languages. Often, PaaS providers also have a Software as a Service offering (see below), and the platform has been initially built to support that specific software. Some examples of PaaS solutions are the “Google App Engine” system, “Heroku” which operates on top of the Amazon Web Services IaaS system, and “Force.com” built as part of the SalesForce.com Software as a Service offering

Characteristics of PaaS

There are a number of different takes on what constitutes PaaS but some basic characteristics include

• Services to develop, test, deploy, host and maintain applications in the same integrated development environment. All the varying services needed to fulfil the application development process

• Web based user interface creation tools help to create, modify, test and deploy different UI scenarios

• Multi-tenant architecture where multiple concurrent users utilize the same development application

• Built in scalability of deployed software including load balancing and failover

• Integration with web services and databases via common standards

• Support for development team collaboration – some PaaS solutions include project planning and communication tools

• Tools to handle billing and subscription management

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Providing the fundamental building blocks of computing resources, IaaS takes the traditional physical computer hardware, such as servers, storage arrays, and networking, and lets you build virtual infrastructure that mimics these resources, but which can be created, reconfigured, resized, and removed within moments, as and when a task requires it. The most well known IaaS provider, Amazon Web Services, offers a variety of options, including their “EC2” computing platform, and “S3” storage platform.

Characteristics of IaaS

As with the two previous sections, SaaS and PaaS, IaaS is a rapidly developing field. That said there are some core characteristics which describe what IaaS is. IaaS is generally accepted to comply with the following;

• Resources are distributed as a service

• Allows for dynamic scaling

• Has a variable cost, utility pricing model

• Generally includes multiple users on a single piece of hardware

There are a plethora of IaaS providers out there from the largest Cloud players like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace to more boutique regional players.

 IaaS is that technology that help and assist as the ability to deploy multiple types of clouds

. These three acronyms describe services in particular, but not cloud computing specifically.  It just happens that cloud computing is often broken down into these three segments.  From here on though

Key characteristics of a cloud based solution are:

• ·         It is available on demand.
• ·         It can be accessed through standard platforms like desktop, laptop, mobile.
• ·         It can be used by multiple people.
• ·         People can share resources.
• ·         It can easily handle increase/decrease of user base.
• ·         Solution can scale up/down easily.
• ·         Billing for the service can be easily measured.

In very short, a summary that what they do and deliver with example.

IaaS - OVH, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, AWS(Partially - EC2, EBS, S3)

They provide you with servers, storage, network

PaaS - Google App Engine, EngineYard, Heroku, AWS (Partially - DynamoDB, SQS, SNS)

They provide you the stack to host your application. You just have to follow their standards like where the stack can find your application, your startup script and/or config, scaling configurations, etc.

SaaS - Salesforce, GMail, Quickbooks online

They provide you the software itself.

There are lots of theory and concept to understand the CLOUD. will be back with more on this very soon.