Understanding IaaS and PaaS

What is IaaS? What is PaaS?

In the tech world, we are constantly hearing about new offerings and fresh approaches to solving common problems that quickly become adopted as industry norms. Just about everyone has heard of (and become familiar with) Software-as-a-Service, but over time SaaS has increasingly been flanked by its two as-a-service cousins: IaaS and PaaS. In this post we will look specifically at those cousins and answer the following questions: What is IaaS? What is PaaS?

IaaS: Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Infrastructure as a service is a type of cloud computing service that provides customers with virtualized computing resources over the internet. These resources (virtual machines, storage, and networking) can then be used to run applications and store data. IaaS providers typically handle the maintenance and management of the underlying physical infrastructure, allowing customers to focus on their own applications and services. There are several benefits of using IaaS:

• Scalability: IaaS allows businesses to easily scale their computing resources up or down as needed, without having to invest in new hardware or make changes to their existing infrastructure.
• Flexibility: IaaS allows businesses to match a broad range of resource profiles with demand and to run a variety of different types of workloads and applications.
• Cost savings: IaaS providers typically charge customers for only the resources that they use, which can be more cost-effective than purchasing and maintaining an in-house infrastructure.
• Reduced maintenance: IaaS providers handle the maintenance and management of the underlying infrastructure, so businesses do not have to worry about maintaining hardware or software.
• Access to specialized resources: IaaS providers often offer specialized resources, such as GPU instances or high-performance storage, which may be difficult or expensive to acquire in-house.

However, there may also be challenges to using IaaS:

• Limited control: Businesses have limited control over the underlying infrastructure and may be subject to the provider’s policies and limitations.
• Security: IaaS providers are responsible for securing the infrastructure, but customers are responsible for securing their own applications and data.
• Network Latency: Depending on the location of the provider’s data centers and the location of the users, there is potential for varying degrees of network latency, which can affect the performance of the applications.
• Vendor lock-in: Businesses may become dependent on a specific IaaS provider, particularly if consuming highly specialized offerings, making it difficult or costly to switch to a different provider if needed.
• Compliance: Some companies may have compliance requirements that cannot be met by certain IaaS providers.

One example of a well-known IaaS offering is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The EC2 service allows customers to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand, choosing from a variety of different instance types, and each with different performance specifications. One of those instance types is detailed here:

• 2 vCPUs (virtual CPUs)
• 8 GiB of memory
• 2 x 900 GB NVMe SSD storage
• 10 Gbps network performance

This type of instance is well suited for a wide range of general purpose workloads (hosting web servers, running databases, running application servers, etc.). A customer might use this instance type to run a web application that serves a large number of users. The customer is able to launch multiple instances of this type to handle the traffic and user requests, using the storage provided by EC2 to store data and files related to their application.

Instances can then be scaled up to handle an increase in traffic or scaled down to save costs when demand decreases. A customer can also adjust the configurations of their instances, varying the amount of memory or storage to optimize the performance of their application.

The scalability and flexibility of this type of IaaS offering affords customers the ability to run a wide variety of workloads and keep pace with changing business needs.

PaaS: Platform-as-a-Service

Platform as a Service is a cloud computing model that provides customers with a platform for building, deploying, and managing web applications and services. PaaS providers typically handle the underlying infrastructure and middleware (web servers, databases, runtime environments, etc.), allowing customers to focus on developing and running their applications. There are several benefits of using PaaS:

• Increased development efficiency: PaaS provides developers with a pre-configured, ready-to-use platform for building, deploying, and managing web applications and services. This can save time and reduce the need for IT infrastructure and operations expertise.
• Reduced costs: PaaS providers typically charge customers only for the resources they use, which can be more cost-effective than building and maintaining an in-house infrastructure.
• Scalability: PaaS allows businesses to easily scale their applications and services up or down as needed, without having to make changes to their existing infrastructure.
• Flexibility: PaaS allows businesses to quickly provision new resource types as needed, making it easy to run a wide range of workloads and applications.
• Access to specialized components: PaaS providers frequently offer a variety of pre-built application components and services (databases, messaging queues, caching systems, etc.) that can easily be integrated into applications.

However, there may also be challenges to using PaaS:

• Limited control: Businesses have limited control over the underlying infrastructure and may be subject to the provider’s policies and limitations.
• Security: PaaS providers are responsible for securing the infrastructure, but customers are responsible for securing their own applications and data. These two are not always perfectly aligned.
• Vendor lock-in: Businesses may become dependent on a specific PaaS provider, making it difficult or costly to switch to a different provider when needed.
• Limited customization: PaaS providers typically offer a fixed set of tools and services, which may not be suitable for all types of applications or use cases.
• Compliance: Some companies may have compliance requirements that cannot be met by certain PaaS providers, so they need to be careful when choosing a provider.

One example of a PaaS offering is the Google App Engine service provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google App Engine is a fully managed platform for developing and deploying web applications and services, allowing customers to build and run their applications using a variety of programming languages (Python, Java, Go, PHP, etc.). The App Engine standard environment provides automatic scaling for web applications based on the traffic that the application receives, pairing that with a variety of ancillary services and APIs that can easily be integrated into applications (Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, etc.).

A customer might use Google App Engine to build and deploy a web application that serves a large number of users. That customer would build the application using one of the supported programming languages, deploy it on App Engine, and then use a service like Cloud Datastore to store data and files related to their application. Google App Engine will then automatically scale the number of application instances based on the traffic received, letting the customer focus on development and improvement rather than infrastructure and scaling.

PaaS offerings like this provide customers with a fully managed platform for developing and deploying web applications and services. Those customers are able to quickly adapt to their business demands while often saving both time and resources.