- As defined by the technology market and NIST,
the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
there are three major cloud types.
Software as a service or SaaS
which is an application that you rent
over the open Internet.
Infrastructure as a service or IaaS
which is basically storage, compute,
and other infrastructure services
that you leverage from a remote cloud.
And finally, platform as a service or PaaS
which is an application development testing
and deployment that's on demand.
There are huge fundamental differences
between the different cloud types.
SaaS replaces traditional enterprise applications
such as customer relationship management or CRM
and systems such as enterprise resource planning or ERPs.
These are basically software systems
that are delivered via web browsers.
Examples include Salesforce.com, Microsoft 365,
Google Apps, and many others.
IaaS clouds are designed to replace
pretty much what's in your data center
including storage and compute services.
The major brands of IaaS include Amazon Web Services or AWS.
AWS as it's known dominates the majority of IaaS market.
Platform as a service or PaaS
is a cloud version of application development
and hosting of applications.
Examples of major PaaS players include
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, and Google App Engine
which provide application development services
as well as deployment and hosting.
IaaS provides cheaper platforms for applications
and data since the hardware and software
is shared between known and unknown users.
SaaS provides cheaper ways
to consume enterprise applications such as CRMs and ERPs.
And PaaS provides cheaper ways to build web-based systems
that force standards.
Again, the use of cloud-based resources
mean that we're sharing resources
and avoiding buying our own hardware and software.
This really defines the value of cloud computing in general.