11
I L T A N E T . O R G
W
ith so many different cloud
"as-a-service" models, it can
be challenging to understand
them all. Did you ever think
that pizza could help? By the
way, who doesn't like pizza?.
When considering "the cloud," most service provider
offerings can be categorized into one of three areas:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS), or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
• IaaS involves hosting
infrastructure services,
virtual machines, and
more on hypervisors
hosted by the cloud service
provider and not hosted
within a colocation facility
or data center that the firm
operates.
• PaaS involves the same
components as IaaS
but abstracts further to
providing middleware,
runtime libraries,
database engines, and
other development
services to allow a firm
to build applications hosted by a cloud service
provider.
• SaaS involves an application fully hosted and
maintained by the cloud service provider – all
the firm needs to do is consume and pay for the
application service.
How can pizza help to simplify technical definitions
of cloud services? The popular infographic has been
circulated on the Internet and is one that Kraft Kennedy
referenced during our recent ILTA Roadshow – Delivering
the Cloud Infrastructure Easy Button. Before we get
started, we are not going to debate the merits of New York
vs. Chicago styles of pizza although it would be fun to work
that into a comparison of major cloud service providers.
First, consider traditional on-premises infrastructure that
a firm would deploy and maintain themselves. On-premises
would be similar to buying all
of your pizza ingredients at a
grocery store, assembling that
pizza yourself, using your own
oven with electricity/gas to cook it,
and serving that pizza with soda
on your own dining table. Seems
simple, right?
If you consider IaaS, this
analogy centers around buying
your favorite premade pizza from
the grocery store, cooking it in your
own oven, and serving with soda
on your own dining table. It may
seem a little counterintuitive that
electricity/gas and an oven are not
considered hosted infrastructure
in this analogy but, instead, the
hosted infrastructure framework
on which you build your pizza service are the ingredients
– the cheese, toppings, sauce, etc. – or the physical servers,
storage, networking, etc. that comprise your IaaS provider's
solution. Your IaaS provider packages all those ingredients
for you, thereby allowing you to build a solution on top of it
– your desired lunch or dinner. You then build your virtual
machine servers and applications – or cook the pizza in
"Your IaaS
provider
packages all
those ingredients
for you, thereby
allowing you to
build a solution
on top of it."
