Types of Cloud Services

Cloud Technology is here to stay and in the future will be powering most business as they would have become fully cloud native. With the benefits it offers there is no doubt that the demand for cloud services will grow over the next few years. As a business, you may be considering to move to the cloud but are faced with a lot of questions and don’t know where to start. The cloud landscape is difficult to navigate for starters with the complexity increased by the vastness of features offered by vendors in the cloud business. It is important to note that the cloud is not for everyone hence no two cases are the same. You shouldn’t feel the pressure to jump onto the cloud before you fully understand what it can do for you. That being said, the cloud is great especially for startups. With a wide variety of options it would be wise to give it a try.  Some of the industry players in this line of business of providing cloud infrastructure to customers are:

• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud Platform
• Microsoft Azure
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Digital Ocean
• IBM Softlayer

These cloud providers generally offer services in four main flavors listed below:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

This service offering consists of clean virtual/ bare metal servers that aren’t preconfigured.  As a customer you are responsible for defining your infrastructure such as the virtual private network, load balancers and defining the operating environment also known as the software stack. This option is ideal when you prefer to have fine grained control over your infrastructure. It is also chosen by teams that need custom requirements that do not come off the shelf to run their applications. However it requires experienced professionals who have good developer operations (dev-ops) and or system administration teams. An example of IaaS is Amazon’s EC2 and Google’s Compute Engine.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a service is much easier to maneuver as it contains wizards to help you set up and configure your environment. It comes with some software preconfigured for the customers to use. The level of control is reduced a bit but this is ideal when your environment configuration matches the available software stacks. PaaS offerings enable you to focus less on configuration and more on your core applications. An example of PaaS offering is Amazon‘s Elastic Beanstalk and Google’s App Engine

Software as a Service (SaaS)

As the name suggests, software is offered to you as a service ready to go. This option is packaged as a finished product that addresses a certain set of business needs that you as a customer may need. The advantage of using SaaS is that you can work from anywhere besides the office as long as you have an internet connection and you don’t have to worry about who is handling the underlying infrastructure. It is very possible to have zero or little configuration in SaaS hence ideal for you when your core business doesn’t involve technology like real estate. Examples of SaaS are Microsoft’s Office 365 and Oracle’s Autonomous database.

Serverless

Serverless takes it up a notch by providing nearly zero configuration. If you are a developer at heart and you want to focus on code then serverless might be the right pick for you. In serverless, you pay for the time your code runs or executes. That’s cool right? It doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no servers involved. It just means that the weight of you worrying about anything outside your code is removed from your shoulders. Typical examples of serverless are Amazon‘s Lambda and Google’s Cloud Functions.