Cloud Services Explained
Cloud Services are a variety of services that are provided to businesses and customers on demand over the internet . With no internal infrastructure or hardware required, these services are intended to offer quick, economical access to resources and applications. In this Article, I am going to use very simple and straight forward examples to Illustrate cloud services. There are 3 different types of services. Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS) and lastly Software as a Service(SaaS).
Firstly, lets talk about Infrastructure as a Service. IaaS provides users with access to Compute, Networking and Storage for their use on a pay as you go basis. It places a responsibility on the user for managing how they access their Data, Applications, Runtime, Operating System and Virtual Machine. Lets use three scenerios of car usage to explain the cloud services: you buy a new car, you use a taxi service like Uber or Bolt and finally you decide to rent a car from a car rental service. Each of these scenarios will throw a certain kind of responsibility on the user. For Infrastructure as a Service, the right scenario would be the purchase of a new car. As someone that just bought a car, you would be required to check when your fuel is low, when you need to change oil, get a driver’s license so that you do not get into trouble with the police and most importantly drive with care so that you do not run into another car on the road.
Secondly, Platform as a Service. Without putting much emphasis on managing the underpinning infrastructure, it offers a space for developing, testing, and deploying software applications. Because of the peculiarity of PaaS, you only need to manage how you access your data and your application. We will use the renting of a car from a car hire service as the appropriate car scenario to represent this. When you rent a car, you do not concern yourself about the maintenance of the car or anything about the documents of the car. All you just need is to use the car and return back to the rental shop when you need to.
Finally, Software as a Service. Cloud-based applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, email, and calendars, are used by users to connect to and utilize them remotely. So, it’s a prebuilt service and as such the only responsibilty that you have as a user is how to access the prebuilt service and start using that service. If we are to use a car scenerio to represent this again, the perfect solution would be you booking for Uber. All you need do is to access uber from your device, book the service and enjoy the ride. The driver is responsible for his license, fuel and other issues related to driving a car. All you car about is enjoying the ride.
Summary
We have seen three different scenerios of car usage being used to explain the cloud services in this article: you buy a brand new car, you use a taxi service like Uber or Bolt and finally you decide to rent a car from a car rental service. Each of these scenarios will throw a certain kind of responsibility on the user which are synonymous to the responsibility a user of a cloud service have to deal with. Thank you for reading.
