Simple understanding of several major differences between IaaS PaaS SaaS

1. Concept

1. IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service), infrastructure as a service, is the underlying hardware, such as network equipment, storage equipment, CPU, etc., as well as virtual containers on top of the hardware
2. PaaS (Platform-as-a-service): Platform as a service, based on IaaS, it solves the construction and operation problems of operating systems, databases, runtime environments, middleware, and various frameworks. Its existence can be regarded as a Platform services, developers can register to use or use its capability interface to customize development
3. SaaS (Software-as-a-service), software as a service. Based on the first two, merchants develop professional software platforms and sell them to different tenants through accounts. They can also customize modules individually according to user needs. Leave everything to the manufacturer

Among them, PaaS is the most difficult to understand, because the names on the market all have their own different aspects, and their general characteristics are as follows:

Characteristics of PAAS

(1) Automatic scaling: including applications and data. Application scalability is the ability to automatically scale to adapt to changes in user access load, and data scalability is the ability to adapt to a substantial increase in the amount of application data.

(2) Convenient management and maintenance: The platform has good reliability, performance and security guarantees. The operation of the platform is uniformly monitored and maintained by the service provider without user participation.

(3) On-demand billing: Users do not need to purchase the application platform once, but can be billed based on the platform service capabilities they actually use (including computing, storage, queues, messages, databases, application services, etc.).

(4) Platform binding: The development and execution of user programs need to rely on the programming interface provided by the platform provider to achieve sticky binding between the application program and the service platform.

(5) Convenient application deployment: Users only need to develop applications, application deployment is very simple, and application management is left to the platform service provider.

For better understanding, let’s use two examples to make a simple analogy:

 housing:

        laas: dig the foundation and build the frame; paas: rough room with walls and windows; saas: fine decoration, move in with your bags

Make pizza:

 

2. The relationship between the three

All three have very large product groups and user service groups, and have formed the cornerstone of major manufacturers. The characteristics between the three are also very obvious. They are dependent layer by layer from top to bottom, and the objects they face are completely different.

3. Charging model

IaaS: Charges are based on the configuration of selected hardware resources, such as Alibaba Cloud's CPU, hard disk, and memory.

PaaS: It can flexibly provide the resources and capabilities required for the execution of applications, and charge fees based on the actual resource usage of the user program.

        On-demand billing: Users do not need to purchase the application platform once, but can be billed based on the platform service capabilities they actually use (including computing, storage, queues, messages, databases, application services, etc.)

SaaS: Charges are based on the functional modules and permissions of the software, which may also involve the number of accounts.

5. Mainstream platforms

IaaS: Cloud servers of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud

PaaS: Defan, Kingdee Cloud, AWS PaaS, Jiandao Cloud, etc. (low code, no code development, modular decoupling, support cloud deployment)

SaaS: Software from many industries such as DingTalk and UFIDA