IaaS & PaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a service is the first level of cloud computing, it is the physical hardware that can run cloud platforms and subsequently SaaS, INaaS & BPaaS. Or, can be purchased used as stand alone hardware as it meets the 5 criteria for cloud computing set out on the introduction page. There are 7 main use cases for IaaS which are:

  1. Storage
  2. IT Systems Monitoring
  3. Back Up & Recovery
  4. Platform Hosting
  5. Web Hosting
  6. Computing
  7. Service Management

There are a wide range of public clouds available that fulfill a wide range of Infrastructure needs, such as: DropBox, Google Print, Amazon EC2, HP Cloud, Rack Space, Amazon Cloud, Just Cloud, Zipcloud & Carbonite.However there are a wide range of public and community clouds that are used to provide IaaS to large corporations, institutions and universities.

Top Cloud Providers of 2018
Top Cloud Providers of 2018

Platform as a Service (IaaS)

PaaS's are the platforms that are built on top of IaaS infrastructure. These platforms can then be used to build SaaS software or for stand alone functions such as Data Warehousing or database hosting. The 7 areas of PaaS are:

  1. Data Warehousing
  2. Business Intelligence
  3. Database Services
  4. Application Development
  5. Application Testing
  6. Application Hosting
  7. Application Integration

The disadvantage of PaaS platforms such as Amazon Web Services is over reliance, if an application has been built on a platform it is often too expensive and time consuming to move to another platform and if an organization's platform of choice is having reliability issues or has become too costly after a tariff price rise for example, this can cause serious issues within the company or institution.