Recently I was trying to describe the various types of cloud services available for modern IT deployment. Like many, I resorted to an analogy — the ever popular “Pizza as a Service”.
However, the more I tried to use it, the more strained it became — my main difficulties were:
- The elements intuitively thought of as infrastructure Eg Oven, Electric / Gas and Dining Table were not provided by Infrastructure as a Service.
- The benefit of Platform as a Service is that all the “mundane” stuff is taken care of, giving you the space to concentrate on creating great applications. In this analogy, surely that’s the pizza itself — not the drinks and eating surface…
- With Software as a Service, the vendor appears to manage everything — so there’s nothing left for you to do. In reality, you would normally need to configure the product (even if that’s just choosing your email address or background image)
- It also excludes some important new additions to the aaS family — in particular Functions as a Service
Not being one to overthink things(!), I decided to redraw the graphic including some recent aaSes and what I consider to be…