by Filip
12. May 2010 21:46
Today I attended “The Cloud: We’re all in!” event organized by the Belgian Architect Forum.
David Chappell’s keynote was very useful to make sense of the available services and their providers. You can read more in his white paper “A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms”.
What I take away from this presentation is the definion of Iaas, Paas, and Saas.
Iaas - Infrastructure as as Service
IaaS or Cloud Infrastructure Service delivers the computer infrastructure: the network- and security components, physical hardware, and virtual servers. To the customer the IaaS service is presented as a virtual computing instance. Essentially the Operating System is not included with the service. As a customer you upload your operating system and/or middleware to your virtual cloud computing instance.
To my knowledge Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is still the best known Iaas offering at the moment.
PaaS – Platform as a Service
PaaS or Cloud Platform Service goes one step further and includes the operating system and middleware. As a customer you order a an application framework platform on top of which you (develop and) run your own software.
Windows Azure is a PaaS offering. As a Windows Azure customer you get a platform running the .Net application framework. SQL Azure is a SQL Server platform running in the cloud. Other examples include the Google App Engine and Force.com - on which respectively Google Apps and SalesForce.com are running - but that you purchase as a platform.
SaaS – Software as a Service
SaaS or Cloud Software Service is the term that people tend to interchange most with ‘cloud’ because most services are provided as a SaaS offering. Customers subscribe to access commercially available software.
Microsoft Exchange Online delivers for example an enterprise messaging solution based on Microsoft Exchange, while Salesforce is a CRM solution. There’s abundant other examples available.
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