Product Manager lesson series — the different types of Cloud

As PMs we should strive to be learn as much as possible on the tech side, to better equip us to understand the implementation and viability of our products.

You do not have to be a developer yourself or a coder. You do need to understand the different, most common, service models offered by cloud providers.

The reason as PM needs to know this is that they are business owners. Whatever decisions your development partners, your system architect makes, will have an impact on your time to market, your ability to customize your products and your cost.

This short description is here to allow you to have a more informed discussion with your development team.

source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cloud-adoption-framework/strategy/monitoring-strategy

There are four main cloud models you should be aware of

• No Cloud — which means On-premises — computing power and infrastructure are all in physical location of your company; you will see it in banks, insurance companies, government, many retailers and older orgs
• IaaS — infrastructure as a Service
• PaaS — Platform as a Service
• SaaS — Software as a service

The more in blue in the picture above, the more customization you can have but your dev cost / time to market will increase

The more in green, the faster you will be to market, but less customization you will have.

For example: in the on-premises, all services are done by your development and IT team (all in blue in the picture).

IaaS — infrastructure as a service

• Cloud provides the minimal infrastructure: basically the physical computer and computing power, networking, discs etc.
• The dev team / client does all the rest
• Most common example you have probably seen is virtual machines (VMs): the cloud provider gives you everything for your team to run virtual machines on its platform

PaaS- Platform as a Service

• Cloud provider offers the entire platform for running apps (Think hardware and the actual Operating System, updates, etc. ) you can call it to full “rails” on which your solution will run
• Your dev team will just handle your application development and data
• Essentially, dev team just brings their code to run (your product to run)
• Most common example: web apps

SaaS — Software as a Service; you control nothing

• You buy someone’s else’s software, runs completely in the cloud
• Your dev team integrates it
• You usually cannot customize it
• You are very fast to market
• Example: SalesForce CRM, Google Docs, Office 365

We saw:

• on-premises
• IaaS
• PaaS
• SaaS

As a side note there are other that are less common:

• Function as a Service (FaaS)
• DBaaS — Database as a Service
• DaaS -Desktop as a Service
• IOTaaS — IOT as a service
• AIaaS — AI as a Service