Cloud Computing makes use of remote servers instead of local servers or personal computers to store, manage, and process data. The foundations for cloud computing are grids and clusters. Cloud service providers provide cloud computing services with a usage cost.
Cloud Computing types:
Software as a service (SaaS)
Platform as a service (PaaS)
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Anything/Everything as a service (XaaS)
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Because they are stacked on top of one another, they are also known as cloud computing stacks. These abstraction layers may also be considered as a layered architecture in which services from a higher layer can be made of services from a lower one, for example, SaaS can supply Infrastructure.
Table of Content:
Software as a service (SaaS)
We used to install software and run applications for some services while the application consumes our storage and has to do expenses for software maintenance too. To avoid this burden, Software as a service introduced a way of delivering services and applications via the internet. We just need to access them through the internet.
Saas applications are also called Web-based software, on-demand software, or hosted software. It gives complete software solutions that have to pay-as-you-go basis from cloud service providers.
Companies providing Saas:
Cloud9 Analytics
Salesforce.com
Cloud Switch
Microsoft Office 365
Big Commerce
Eloqua
DropBox
Cloud Tran.
Advantages of SaaS
Cost Effective: pay only for what you use.
Reduced time: Since users do not need to install and run applications, it saves time spent on software installation when the user can access it through the web browser.
Accessibility: Can access the app data from anywhere.
Automatic updates: Saas providers updates the software automatically.
Scalability: Can access the service and features on demand.
Platform as a service (PaaS)
Paas allows developers to build applications and services over the internet as a platform. Users can use the Paas services which are hosted in the cloud by the web browser.
Users do not have to use in-house hardware and software to develop and run new applications since they are hosted by Paas providers on their own infrastructure.
The consumer has control of the established application and configuration settings for the application-hosting environment but can not manage or control the principal cloud infrastructure which includes network, servers, OS, or storage.
Advantages of PaaS
Simple and convenient for users: Users can access anywhere in the given infrastructure and services from a web browser.
Cost-Effective: pay only for what you use.
Managing the lifecycle efficiently: Supports complete web lifecycle: building, testing, deploying, managing, and updating.
Efficiency: It enables higher-level programming with decreased complexity, allowing for more successful application development overall.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Infrastructure as a service also known as Hardware as a Service(Haas) gives computer infrastructure as an outsource to enterprises like network equipment, devices, database, and web servers.
Customers can pay on a per-user basis such as hour, week, or month and also based on virtual machine space.
It provides operating systems, security, networking, and servers for developing such applications, and services, and deploying development tools, databases, and much more.
Companies providing Iaas:
Amazon web services
Bluestack
IBM
Openstack
Rackspace
Vmware.
Advantages of IaaS
Cost-Effective: Can pay hourly, weekly or monthly and avoids capital expenses and ongoing costs.
Website hosting: Less expensive than traditional hosting.
Security
Maintenance: Do not have to manage underlying data center new releases of the development or underlying software.
Anything/Everything as a service (XaaS)
IaaS is a collection of all the above-provided services including several additional services.
It has all the advantages mentioned above by every type of cloud service.
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Faas can be used as a platform to build, compute, and deploy code or whole applications as functions. Users don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure's maintenance and user can completely build and update the code at any moment. the developed code can be executed in response to a specified event.
Faas is built within the serverless container and it is an event-driven execution model. The user will trigger the event to run the code when the application is developed. That triggered event triggers the servers to run the application. The servers are Linux servers or any other servers that are totally managed by the seller since customers may lack knowledge of any servers, so they do not need to maintain them, resulting in a serverless architecture.
Although PaaS and FaaS offer the same functionality, there are considerable differences in terms of scalability and cost as FaaS allows automatic scaling up and scaling down according to demand.
Users in Faas only need to pay for the number of executions that occur but users in PaaS must pay for the amount based on a pay-as-you-go fee regardless of how much or how little they use.
Companies providing Saas:
Amazon Web Services – Firecracker
Google – Kubernetes
Oracle – Fn
Apache OpenWhisk – IBM
OpenFaaS
Advantages of FaaS:
Highly Scalable: scaling is done depending on demand.
Cost-Effective: only have to pay for the number of events executed.
Code Simplification: user can upload the entire application at once and allows to write code for independent functions or similar to those functions.
Do not have to worry about the server.
Functions can be written in any programming language.
Less control over the system.
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