Back in the day, companies used to deploy and maintain their own IT infrastructure and equipment. This expensive IT equipment like servers, fans and many cables etc. were maintained by a separate IT department and kept onsite. But a slight increase in web traffic may crash the IT infrastructure as it gets outdated fast. It can be time-consuming, expensive, and unreliable. That’s where cloud services come into play. These cloud services are the platforms, software, or infrastructure hosted by third-party providers. They have those pricey equipment and most updated scalable resources that are made available to the users via Internet. So instead of managing everything by yourself, just log into their web application and get an instant access to as many resources as you need. Also, you are only required to pay for what you use. It is reliable, convenient, and an adaptable solution to ease the developers.

How do they work?

Cloud services rely on both hardware and software to function just like any other IT infrastructure solutions. In traditional IT solutions user must have hardware and software architecture on-site. But in cloud infrastructure solutions all user need is an operating system installed on their Pc’s and stable internet connection. Now a days a lot of companies offer cloud platforms at affordable prices. The Users are asked to make an account on cloud infrastructure provider’s website by paying for their subscription and all is ready for them to use. Organizations must pay attention to their company needs while purchasing the cloud services and chose only those that works best for their business.

Types of Cloud Services (Service Model)

Cloud services includes the technologies, platforms, software, or infrastructures that users can access without any additional software installations and configurations. Cloud services has following four types of as-a-Service delivery models.

    1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
    2. Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS)
    3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    4. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)

 

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

It provides the user with a cloud application, a platform on which this application runs and the underlying infrastructure for this platform. The name “software” suggests that it lends the user a developed application which is customized according to their needs. It works best for under-skilled IT person and save them from the hassle of learning the development phase from scratch.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

It supplies a platform to run user developed application on it, as well as the platform infrastructure that is required to run the application. As the name “platform” suggests that it provides a platform to those developers who can code their application and all they need is the platform and its IT infrastructure to build the application on it. 

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

So, if the developer has the platform and they have already built their application. They now need the compute, networking, and storage resources to manage their application. This is provided by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model as suggested in the name “Infrastructure”.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS)

It is an event-driven service model. It allows the developers to build, run and manage the application as functions without any need to maintain the infrastructure. It is server less computing because the cloud provider takes care of the operating and runtime systems user just need to package and deploy the code.

Types of Cloud (Deployment Model)

Clouds can also be defined as cloud services that abstract, pool and enables the user to share scalable resources over a network. Cloud computing is basically is the computation of workloads in a cloud environment where cloud is its main unit. Clouds are a type of PaaS, as web-based platform and its underlying infrastructure is supplied to the user. There are also four types of cloud.

  1. Private Clouds
  2. Public Clouds
  3. Hybrid Clouds
  4. Multi Clouds

Private Clouds

Cloud environments that are solely dedicated to the user and usually confined within the end user’s firewall are Private Clouds. They are sometimes also available on premise.

Public Clouds

Public Clouds are created from the resources offered by the cloud providers and available to the public. They are not owned by one user and can be redistributed to other rented users.

Hybrid Clouds

Multiple cloud environments allowing some sort of workload portability and management are hybrid clouds. They also provide orchestration i.e., automated configuration, applications, and services etc.

Multi Clouds

Multi clouds are those IT infrastructure systems that have more than one clouds which can be either public or private. They are sometimes networked together but not necessarily.

Cloud Services as Infrastructure

Cloud Service Providers abstract the hardware computing capabilities such as CPU’s processing power, RAM’s active memory, graphing processing of GPUs and available data storage from hard drives. This is achieved in virtualized environment through virtual machines and the computing, storage and network resources are then made accessible to the user over internet as infrastructure or IaaS. This ease of access has led to the concept of cloud storage, that enables the user to store huge amounts of data on cloud.

Cloud Services as Platforms

Cloud Service Providers can also create online platforms by using their hardware resources. These platforms are IT environments where developers can build their own codes and run their applications. For building a cloud platform, cloud providers abstract hardware component from the user. But it also requires additional development levels so that technologies like orchestration, containerization, application programming interfaces (APIs), security, routing, automation, and management can be incorporated. To provide user with navigable user interface, user experience design is also kept in consideration. If infrastructural components of PaaS are highly scalable and can be shared, they are considered as cloud platform. Managed private clouds in which all clouds services are managed by someone other than the user and public clouds are the best example of PaaS clouds. Some popular public clouds are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud.

Cloud Services as Software

The worldwide accepted cloud service is knowns as SaaS that offers full web application to end user. It is the most expensive of all cloud services because everything is provided by the cloud provider as a whole package.

Why Cloud-Tribe?

Do you want to keep up with the industry trends and prepare your company for the future? Cloud-Tribe is the right place for you. Build your own virtual data centre from scratch or take advantage of our ready-made deployments.