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endan
endan

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Explain *aaS and other variants Like I'm Five

____ as a Service, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, etc. What are they? Are there something common between them?

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

The common part is the "as a service", which means that whatever you're buying, someone else is contracting to maintain it so you don't have to. With *aaS it is common for the vendor to make certain guarantees regarding uptime, how long it'll take them to address outages or issues, and so on. This is called a "service level agreement" or SLA.

Software as a service: I sell you a license to use an instance of my application (say, an issue tracker or webmail). You log in and set things up for your organization. I own the servers. If you have a problem that you can't fix through whatever admin UI you have access to, you have to go through my support team.

Platform as a service: I sell you a license to build and deploy applications that work in my cloud. You write some code that hooks into my APIs and set up some of the environment in a controlled manner, like spinning up a database server with Amazon RDS. I own the cloud and everything you're talking to. If something goes wrong on the hardware end or if you blow up your software development community site by triggering a deploy cascade (😉) you have to go through my support team.

Infrastructure as a service: I sell you a license to use my virtualization framework. You log in and spin up virtual servers, volumes, and networks, and administer them how you like. I own the host machines. If there's a network outage or a meteor hits the data center, fixing it is on me, but if you wipe your own database I don't care. Also, I'm Google or Amazon because you have to be huge for this to make sense as a business model.

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jjjjcccjjf profile image
endan

So they are just buzzwords after all. 😂 The first paragraph explains it all. Thanks! (When you deploy just right 😆👌 p.s. love you Ben)

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Valentin Silvestre

You can add the Function As A Service part ?

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

FaaS is comparable to PaaS except your application is "serverless", so instead of deploying a running application into my cloud you're building your backend by tying my APIs together with your own code snippets that fire when invoked. Rob Conery's NDC Oslo 2017 talk gets into this: youtube.com/watch?v=BmZhSS40yAMf

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Valentin Silvestre • Edited

Tbh I knew about it but it was good to add it for others people :)

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

Nothing stopping you from adding to the list yourself! :)

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Valentin Silvestre

My english is bad and the comprehension of the subject is important, I can't describe it as you do. :)