Service Types

We hear about many products in the cloud that ends with As a Service, these are resources that we can rent for some time, rather than owning them, this helps majorly in cost savings as we only pay for the time, computing, storage that we use from a cloud provider.

• No commitments
• Pay for what we use
• The cloud provider takes care of the infrastructure and operational costs of the service while we use it

IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

These are essential services of technology

• Computing
• Storage
• Networking These are real-world equivalents of the services that we run on-prem/data centers, also called cloud replacements.

IaaS Computing

• Azure Virtual Machines which have an OS installed of our choice
• Pay by the second/minute
• Many options of configurations in CPU speeds, RAM sizes, and other various task-specific optimizations.

IaaS Storage

• Azure storage is one such example of the many services available
• Can handle blobs, files queues, and tables
• These can also be configured as a data lake

IaaS Networking

• Virtual Networks and Subnets (cost nothing)
• There are ingress and egress bandwidth costs
  • ingress - data coming into our machine/services.
  • egress - data leaving our machine/services.

PaaS - Platform as a Service

• Cloud providers offer more than just basic infrastructure, like a service layer on top of IaaS.
• Middleware, development tools, database server, and more.

PaaS - Computing

Azure App Service is a PaaS Product, which eliminates a lot of the server configuration and only focuses on the application configuration.

• One can deploy an app, by just linking a repo or by uploading a zip file
• Includes scaling features, CI/CD, containerization, and other dev tools

PaaS - Storage

Azure Managed Storage or Database Service are some examples that take care of all the storage scaling and maintenance.

PaaS - Networking

Azure Front Door is an example of this, which also include a Load Balancer and a managed firewall where all the configuration takes place over a GUI.

SaaS - Software as a Service

• Cloud Apps
• Office 365
• The app is ready to be used and we simply need to set it up and use it