Cloud service categories - Azure Tutorial

We're going to cover the different cloud service categories, and I'm going to do this in plain English. I'm going to use a restaurant analogy to explain these different cloud service categories. We're going to start off with Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS. So, if we think about that from a restaurant scenario, an analogy using a restaurant, in infrastructure as a service, the people who own the restaurant provide kitchen space, they provide all of the infrastructure, which would be things like ovens, and sinks, and dishwashers, and freezers. They provide all the prep areas. Now, what you bring to the table is food items, ingredients, spices, recipes, cooking utensils. In this scenario, the infrastructure for the restaurant is provided by the restaurant provider. In a Cloud scenario, that means that the infrastructure such as computers and those types of things are provided by the Cloud provider, and then you bring your deployments to that. Now, in this scenario, if you think about this kitchen, you have the ability to decide the layout of the kitchen, and how you're going to prepare the different food items, and when you're going to change your recipes, and when you're going to update, how you're going to cook things, and all those types of things. So you have a lot of flexibility and control in this scenario. You're just getting the equipment and all of those types of things from the restaurant provider. So that's an analogy for IaaS or infrastructure as a service. Now, if we move to platform as a service, now the restaurant provider provides the kitchen space, and the ovens, and sinks, and dishwasher, and freezers, and prep areas like they did before, but they also now provide food items and ingredients and standardized recipes. So you've lost some of your flexibility here. You no longer have the ability to provide your own recipes. You do have the ability to put your own twist on those. So you can kind of change those recipes a little bit to provide something that has your own flavor. And then of course, you also have to do the cooking of those recipes. Now in a cloud service scenario, this means that like in IaaS, you get all of the infrastructure. So you get all of the computers that are provided by the cloud provider. You have to provide your own deployment and your deployment sits on top of a platform that has been developed for you already. So you lose some of your flexibility and control, but you gain a lot of capability provided by the cloud provider. So think of this in like a website scenario, the website platform and how that works is provided by the cloud provider. What you provide is the content that plugs into that platform. Now, if we think about a SAS environment or software as a service, the restaurant provides just as with IIS and PAS, the kitchen space, the oven, sinks, dishwashers, freezers, prep areas, but also food items and ingredients, and also standardized recipes and cooking and serving. So in this scenario, your responsibility is to consume, to eat. Now that might sound great, because eating is a great part of restaurants. But you can see here that you've lost all capability of controlling any of these other things. The only thing that you have the ability to do is consume what is provided for you. Now in a cloud service category, that would mean something like Netflix. Obviously with Netflix, You don't have any ability to control any of the environment or how that works, or what kind of computers are running, that kind of thing. You're just simply a consumer. Could also be something like Outlook.com for providing e-mail. So you use that service to read your e-mail, to consume your e-mail, but you don't have any capability or visibility into the platform itself. All of that is provided by the Cloud provider. So IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Now, one of the things that's interesting here, and you may have already caught on to this, is this aligns very nicely with the shared responsibility model that we talked about earlier. Remember that I said that there are some decisions that you can make that change where that balance is. Here is where that decision-making comes into play. It's your choices that affect your balance of responsibility and control. and we very frequently represent this using what's called the cloud pyramid which is shown here so at the bottom of the cloud pyramid you have the most amount of flexibility and capability to control things but you also have the most amount of responsibility now as you get to the PaaS services you lose a little bit of that capability to change things and manage things because the platform is now provided by the cloud provider but you also give up a little bit of your responsibility so it's kind of like the middle ground of these different cloud service categories now at the top of the cloud pyramid you have SaaS services and in a SaaS service you have almost no responsibility, and almost no control. You're really just a consumer. So if you're using, for example, Outlook.com, do you know what version of the operating system is running on those servers? No, you don't. Do you know when they're upgrading those servers with updates and those types of things? No, you don't. And you really don't even care. you just know that when you go to Outlook.com, you want to be able to read your e-mail. Your responsibility is very small. That's how you can change that balance of the shared responsibility model by choosing an appropriate Cloud Service category.