Describe Cloud Service Types

Question 1

What is IaaS?

Answer 1

• most flexible category of cloud services as it provides you the max amount of control for resources
• Cloud provider is responsible for maintaining hardware, network connectivity and physical security
• You are in charge of everything else; OS, installation, config, maintenance, network config, DB and storage config and so on
• You rent hardware in a cloud data center but what you do with the hardware is up to you
• e.g Azure itself or GCP/AWS

Question 2

What scenarios might we use IaaS?

Answer 2

• Lift and shift migration; moving things running on-prem to running on the IaaS infrastructure
• testing and development; you have established configurations for development and test environments that you need to rapidly replicate. You can stand up or shut down the different environments rapidly with an IaaS structure while maintaining complete control

Question 3

What is PaaS?

Answer 3

• middle ground between renting space in datacenter (IaaS) and paying for complete and deployed solution (SaaS)
• cloud provider maintains physical infrastructure, security, connection to the internet, OS’, middleware, dev tools and business intelligence services
• you don’t worry about licencing or patching for OS’ and DBs
• provides a complete dev environment without the headache of maintaining all the dev infrastructure
• Think of it like using a domain joined machine where IT maintains the device with updates, patches and refreshes
• e.g. Azure App Service

Question 4

What scenarios might we use PaaS?

Answer 4

• Dev framework; Provides framework that devs can build upon to develop custom cloud based apps. Lets devs create apps using built-in software components. Scalability and high availability are included
• Analytics or business intelligence; tools provided as a service with PaaS allow organisation to analyse and mine their data, finding patterns and predicting outcomes to improve forecasting

Question 5

what is SaaS?

Answer 5

• most complete cloud service model from a product perspective
• you are renting or using a fully developed application
• Emai, financial software, messaging applications and connectivity software are all examples
• least flexible but also easiest to get up and running
• least amount of tech knowledge required
• e.g JIRA or Gmail