Introduction to Cloud Service Models

Introduction

Once we have decided the cloud computing model, we'll pick up the appropriate service model that suits our business requirements. Cloud vendors build their cloud platforms to serve a wider audience. Since requirements vary, they must provide different approaches to meet unique business requirements. There are three major categories or service models:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

In addition to these main models, as cloud platforms continue to innovate, we’ll discuss two more models in this lesson:

• Container as a Service (CaaS)
• Function as a Service (FaaS)

These five approaches cover a broader spectrum of use cases and cater to all kinds of workloads that one needs to run in any cloud platform. In each category, cloud platforms offer several services to choose from. Let's dig deep to understand what these different cloud service models mean.

One thing to remember is that depending on which service model we choose, we delegate the responsibility of some of the components to the cloud vendor while managing some on our own. To easily understand these different models, let's first take an analogy of a pizza or pizza as a service. As a customer, I want to have a pizza for dinner tonight. What are the different ways I can fulfill this requirement?