What is a Platform as a Service (or: PaaS) really?
I get the question from the title a lot since I started working at anynines. Which is fair enough, with the Everything as a Service trend, one easily gets the terminology confused. The extension as a service is used in many core components of cloud computing including communication, infrastructure, data and platforms (there we are!). Let’s look at a few of those in more detail.
Infrastructure as a Service
Providers of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offer computers – physical or more often virtual machines – and other resources. A hypervisor – powered by OpenStack in our case – runs the virtual machines (VMs). IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw (block) and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers.
Quite possibly funniest IaaS reference in a Twitter bio ever.
Why would you use IaaS rather than ‘bare metal’? Well, cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility basis (where the cost reflects the amount of actual resources allocated and consumed), which is oftentimes cheaper. (more…)