Kiran’s Chai(Tea Latte) as a Service- Cloud Service Models Exemplified with a personal story…
Foreword:
After I got unique recognition and excellent personal connections developed through my 2021 DosaOps story, that elucidated the power of DevOps, often I have been motivated by different individuals to come up with another story on a popular topic.
Although few topics were on mind, I wanted to give it a time to marinate very well. Finally, after hiatus, I am here again with a personal story!!.
The Motivation:
Thanks to the ongoing Cloud disruption, and the “As a service” has become ubiquitous phrase which all of us comes across very frequently. That basically alludes to “providing a scoped product/solution as a service, to reduce the extreme management/operational burden involved in procuring, configuring and maintaining that service”.
Despite we being familiar on various Cloud service models, that are usually suffixed with “as a service”, confusion still lurks around due to the broad verity of services, the subtleties involved with each service model and wide range of considerations/choices involved in choosing a certain model.
Numerous others models came up post main service models, IaaS, SaaS & PaaS. To complement this, in my own terms, the overall Cloud can simply be attributed as “Data center as a Service”.
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Ready… Get set go……….the Plot Begins:
Starring:
The Great Fan(analogous to Cloud Customer):
I am very fond of Tea(Indian Chai, also known as Chai/Tea Latte internationally) as many of you might do. Tea never ceases to lure its fans due to the wide variety of flavors that can be made.
It used to be so easy for me during the days in Hyderabad, to step out to canteen/street side “chaiwala” to quickly grab a cup of tea.
Now, there is no other way except I randomly get my wife busy by requesting: “One more tea please”. Sometimes verbally, and sometimes with just looks and expressions (which she could figure), when I can’t ask out of hesitation to burden her.
😀😀😀
And, I never miss to take advantage of busy work as an excuse, that can easily fly and get me another cup!
The Genius Cook(analogous to Cloud Service Provider-CSP):
However, as excessive Tea is unhealthy, my wife initially put quota per the day. That didn’t work out well, due to variety of reasons I find to ask for an exception!!.
Needless to say that she is a passionate cook, and she has very keen attention to details in the art of cooking. Ideally she prefers to make most of the pre-requisites(for any recipe) from scratch regardless of the type/complexity. Of course it takes time, but she has that passion to make everything in an organic/healthy manner, to the extent possible.
Notedly, Tea is special and it can be made as easy and quick as boiling water and add readymade ingredients/honey, or as complex as possible as described below in Chapter1, based on the interest, time and energy.
To our surprise, she didn’t spare Tea too from her detailing & customization.😀😀
To suffice my thirst for Tea, she gave a very good thought and came up lot of formulas of Tea, that are healthy as well as tasty!!.
Chapter1:
Make Your Own
I love to start the day with Tea, it gives an energetic kick that surfaces any lethargy after my warm up activities.
Each morning and each instance, she would ask me the type & strength of Tea flavor needed.
She then patiently grinds green tea flakes & roots ,spices (ginger, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, star anise, fennel seeds , lemon grass/leaves, black pepper…) in the stone mill , adds some additional herbs(basil etc), milk, honey /jaggery etc, boils in simmer mode to extract a signature taste.
Same steps repeats for each ask and each instance!!.
Although it is very time consuming and effort staking, it gives her full control on how it should taste and can customize (flavors, intensity of flavors, hotness/sweetness, heat level etc) based on the need.
However, I prefer to enjoy the tea during the little breaks I get but the complexity of this whole process and her busy time with kids & other home operations hesitates me in asking whenever I wanted, with all painstaking and time consuming steps involved.Now, take a Masala Tea break please, to add a Technology flavor to it:
IaaS- Infrastructure as a Service:
IaaS solutions offer complete control to the customers. Users could do whatever configurations they wanted on the infrastructure, and could install desired software and binaries that are required by the applications.
Just like we were able to prepare our own Chai, with all needed ingredients and customizations as desired, IaaS offers complete control on what we wanted to do with our infrastructure.
However, it brings in lot of responsibility and management burden on us and also we need to spend lot of time& efforts in getting infrastructure configured/customized to suit our needs.
Chapter2:
A little Compromise- Make it as easy and quick as possible
Meanwhile she had to undergo a medical procedure and she needed rest for some period. Hence, I tried to put an end for Tea habit by rarely going for it.
However, she noticed my waning interest, and came up with an innovative idea that achieves same goal in an efficient manner with least efforts possible, while ensuring health factor.
To save time and effort with complex process, as we’d seen earlier in Chapter1, she’d ground all needed ingredients before hand and stored them in air tight containers. She did the same for different flavors.
By doing this, there is no need to prepare all ingredients from scratch, which are time taking. It’s just that she asks me the flavor needed for that instance, boils the milk and adds flavored ingredient from the respective container. Its lot quick and easier than earlier.
However, this doesn't take away rest of the effort each time. Also the level of customization is limited with reduced control on ingredients(with prepackaged flavors) and the freshness/quality of taste diminished comparatively. We got to trade off control/customization, taste & freshness with optimization of time & effort. And, I got to go with limited flavors available, that didn't ran out.Now, take one more break please with Cinnamon Tea, to blend this with a service model:
PaaS- Platform as a Service :
PaaS solutions offer moderate amount of control on personal preferences and we can’t access/control base infrastructure settings. However, we could choose specific type of platform (.Net, Python, PHP…) and select amount of resources needed to run our applications.
The biggest advantage is infrastructure management burden will be reduced significantly, and we don’t need to deal with all OS level configurations/software installations, we can spin up PaaS services whenever we want by uploading our code and within short intervals. This gives greater times to market when compared with IaaS solutions.
With pre-configured platform, we could run applications with less effort/burden . (like tea made quickly out of readily available customized tea flavors). However, it will be hard/impossible to inject any custom configurations/libraries that may be required by our applications and have to just use available platforms(like using only the tea flavors that are available, which didn’t ran out).
Chapter3: The Vacation- and the new Idea!!
Ultimately, my family had to go on vacation and I was all alone. Although I am alright at cooking(at-least with Tea) she knew it will not be easy for me with busy schedules and hence she prepared different flavors of Tea in bulk quantities and neatly packed.
To beat my busy schedules & to further optimize time & effort in meeting OnDemand needs, I started to choose a flavor needed, prepare the needed quantity for the day(3–4 cups) early in the morning , put it in a heat holding flask and place at my desk.
With this, there is hardly anytime to spend in making tea for each instance, full contrast to whats described in Chapter1 and significant change with timed efforts required still in Chapter2.
Its super fast and quick and I can fill the cup OnDemand- right at the moment I needed!!
However, it is only one type of flavor I will get for the whole day and there’s no way to customize it, beyond prepackaged/available/prepared flavor for that day. The saved effort/time, convenience and quickness negated the dynamic preferences/control/customizations, and also it begs little compromise with taste/quality/heat.Now, One last break with Ginger Tea, to see it through the Technology lens:
SaaS- Software as a Service :
SaaS solutions are software products that are readily available, that may fit our business models/requirements. CSPs offer variety of products , together with their partners. We could launch any available software on-demand.
The biggest advantage with it is rapid times to market and lowest development/management burden when compared with IaaS/PaaS. Like, I could fill my cup whenever I wanted from the flask.
However, this has key tradeoffs. We could not make low-level/custom configurations per our desires, and cannot make choices on hardware/OS and access control on platform level. We can quickly consume whatever SaaS product that is offered by the vendor. Just like the only flavor I get per day but quickly OnDemand, at the expense of quality/taste/customization/control.
As an exception, worth noting this, some SaaS products may offer a bit of customizations. It totally depends on SaaS Product/Vendor.
Chapter4: A special Guest
Once I ran out of flavors that she made, and to take out all the manual efforts for her once she returns, I bought a coffee maker.
The good part about it is we get variety of pods, with different flavors. We could simply put the pod/flavor we wanted, and fill the cup. Damn easy!!
But its all pre-made, we have to go with whatever the pods pre-packaged by the producer. Least customizability, broad varieties and extreme convenience.
Family returned meanwhile and she gave me a surprise!!.
I had to return that coffeemaker before even unpacking, as I bought it silently without my home department’s approval, before its denied as unhealthy option. Just quoting this to help the context. 😀
We got to an agreement finally; with simplistic, healthy and optimal plan as in Chapter2.
The Final Break please, with special Matcha Green Tea Latte
CaaS- Container as a Service:
Containers are prepackaged IT infrastructure environment that is required to run an application. All the Libraries, Configuration files and OS Dependencies are packaged as container images (like Pods of coffee maker) and can be deployed as containers, within moments. Containers offer broader level of technologies/platforms that may not be possible with PaaS.
Just like putting the Coffee pod we want, hit start button and get the coffee, we can deploy respective container and see the running applications!!.
One of the best advantages of it is abstraction of all OS level/binary/library level nuances, technology/platform varieties and rapid scale of deployment with high amount of scalability and agility. However, container orchestration and management are the things that need special consideration.
Closing Comments:
One of the key factors that need to be considered is Shared Responsibility Model (Google brought up Shared Fate Model) , where the responsibilities are shared between Customer and CSP.
Thorough knowledge is required on all key aspects around model, as it determines customer’s scope of work/responsibilities and can tighten policies/controls accordingly.
For IaaS, PaaS, SaaS: to get an idea on amount of control/responsibilities between provider/customer, refer below picture.
Thanks a lot for making until here!!.
