Making Sense of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS
So you’ve set out to learn more about cloud computing. We bet you didn’t know you’d be learning a new language, too! The jargon associated with the cloud can be confusing and it may be difficult to distinguish between all of the *aaS acronyms you’re seeing.
Cloud computing is a broad term that describes a broad range of services. The most widely accepted definition of Cloud Computing comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) [1]. The NIST definition states that “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
So what do all of these cloud acronyms mean?
We’re going to give you the simplest explanation we can to help you understand the difference between SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. First, let’s expand those acronyms! Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service are all just different types of cloud structures. Let’s look at how they all differ:
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) means you’re renting the app or software
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) means that you’re renting everything but the app or software
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) means you’re renting only the hardware as well as the tools used to manage the hardware
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See? It’s not all that painful! There’s much more depth to it once you get into private, public, and hybrid clouds, but this should give you the basic understanding of the most-used cloud computing abbreviations.