What is Cloud Computing? | IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS | How is Cloud Foundry different from AWS?

With high speed internet facilities cheaply available, the digital world is now accessible to almost every person. Not only large and medium scaled industries, but even the small businesses have now turned up for their own websites or e-commerce sites for selling their products to the customers directly. So demand for an agile and scalable storage is high and here comes “clouds” to the rescue.

 

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Computing is the delivery of services such as storage, databases, servers, software or analytics to the customers over the internet.

Imagine you want to run a website for your small website, now once the site is ready you need to host it in some server which will store the data of your site and is available for public to use. But in order to do so, you will need a server room that in turn will need space and proper maintenance which will in turn increase your cost to run your site.

Now if someone tells you that he has that facility that you want and is ready to host your site with one of his servers. You don’t need any type of storage and you just need to pay according to your usage. It seems to be a great deal, right?

Cloud Computing does the same for your application that you want to host. Rather than owning your own data centers or infrastructures, companies can rent infrastructure from one of the cloud providers and use their service to host any applications. This enables companies to reduce the cost and complexity of hosting their applications and pay as per the usage.

 

Types of Cloud Computing

Clouds can be of different types depending on the needs of a business and the level of security involved. Let’s discuss one by one the different cloud models.

Public Cloud: This model offers services and infrastructure by a third party company and is shared across all of its customers. The service providers have generally a lot of space to offer and according to the needs of the Customers, it is easily scalable. Often recommended for collaborative and small scale projects, this “pay-as-you-go” model helps the small scale businesses an effective way to save costs.

Private Cloud: This model is generally used by a single company of medium or high scale, and is secured by layer(s) of firewall protection. This type of solution provides higher security and as a result comes with a much higher cost since the infrastructure have to be maintained by the company itself.

Hybrid Cloud: This model is a mix of the above types and allows the interaction of data between two of the platforms. The advantage of this model lies in the fact that the storage is easily scalable according to the usage along with the added level of security.

Types of Cloud Services

The cloud providers offers various types of services depending on the needs of the customers. Let’s check each of them.

Infrastructure as a Service: IaaS provides users the basic infrastructures to set-up a stage required to host an application. This includes server, network, storage or similar kinds of service. The clients are responsible to make it usable by setting up the middleware. The main advantage of this service is, it provides the clients the flexibility of complete control over the hardware and they can set-up the platform according to their choice.

Examples include DigitalOcean, Cisco Metapod and Microsoft Azure.

 

Platform as a Service: PaaS provides all the necessary requirements for the clients to host an application. There is no need to setup OS and also no need to take care of any other software needed to build applications. This enables the developers to freely concentrate on the apps and not on how to host their apps and manage them post deployment. This is a cost effective service that is both scalable as well as require no extra headache of maintenance.

Examples include Windows Azure, Heroku and OpenShift.

 

Software as a Service: These are the applications that we use in our daily life that provides services through internet. The software is run by third party companies and us as the consumers, consumes their services either by paying or free of cost depending on the service providers. The main advantage of this service is, it eliminates the need of manpower that is required to download and install the software in the customer’s premises. The platform that hosts the app can be managed from any location and users don’t need to think about its installation and maintenance.

Examples include Gmail, Salesforce and Cisco WebEx.

 

Cloud Foundry and Amazon Web Services --- Differences

Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud-based service that provides a platform for the developers to lighten the load from the operations’ team and concentrate on the development side of the application rather than maintaining it. So, Cloud Foundry is basically Platform as a Service which companies of any size can use it to accelerate the development work.

Amazon Web Services on the other hand, is mostly Infrastructure as a Service but there are some offerings which are Platform as a Service. For instance, Amazon EC2 is IaaS and hence the customer has more control over the hosting environment. AWS Elastic Beanstalk on the other hand is Platform as a Service feature that allows less things to be maintained and supported.

 

Conclusion:

So basically to host a software in a cloud we need a platform which is used to host the application and this service is provided by Platform as a Service (PaaS). Now PaaS needs some basic infrastructure which is needed to hold that platform and this service is provided by Infrastructure as a Service.

Now it depends on the type of service that you want in order to choose between IaaS and PaaS. If you want to have more control over the environment like how much RAM you want or what OS you want to install, go for Infrastructure as a Service. On the other hand, if you want to take less headache on the environment and scale it according to the usage, Platform as a Service is a better option for your cause.