Cloud computing is fast becoming the de facto norm for tech start-ups, SMEs, and big businesses alike. Most are looking to quickly innovate new products, break into new markets, generate added revenue, and because of this, a plethora of new acronyms have arisen. Aimed at the ‘as-a-Service’ market, new offerings are quickly arising built on the backbone of the Cloud Computing giant’s infrastructure of Azure, AWS and GCP, Google Cloud Platform. New software, applications, and specific services on the cloud can easily scaled, updated, patched, and performance-optimized when delivered ‘as-a-Service’. This is something that is often difficult to impossible to do on client infrastructure or client-specific instances. This article defines the three main acronyms and considers newer players using the ‘aaS’ tag. Some, what confusingly, have identical monikers but are very different.
SaaS
Software-as-a-Service was the initiator of the ‘aaS’ brand. In fact, software provisioned as a service has been around almost as long as the internet. Most email providers offer their software, email reading, composition, and delivery, as a service via a web browser. Free providers such as AOL mail, Hotmail, Lycos, and Yahoo launched in the 1990s and joined by Gmail in 2004. They were extremely popular. Hotmail grew from zero to 12 million users in 18 months before it bought by Microsoft. While you could also use mail via local client software, mail essentially provided as a service; therefore SaaS has been around for 30 years, just under a different name. With the release of HTML5 in 2014, the software has seen a dramatic rise in browser-based functionality. From the ever-expanding Microsoft Office Suite to AWS configuration portals and specialized software such as Zeplin for software UI mock-ups and HiBob for Human Resource functions. SaaS is the future, and it is here to stay.
PaaS
Platform-as-a-Service is different from SaaS. Where SaaS offers specific software applications, PaaS providers offer platforms. This means the admins have more control. It also means they have more responsibility and can cause significant issues if they do not know what they are doing. Whereas MS Office online is updated for all its uses by the vendor; PaaS offerings leave a significant proportion of the heavy lifting to the client admin. This is usually because of the complexity of the platform and the deep and broad configuration required by the client. AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, and Heroku are good examples of PaaS offerings.
DevOps Engineers must put the nodes, databases, and firewall rules in place before the platform becomes useable to developers or end-users. None of these ‘features’ are applicable for the Software as a Service platform.
IaaS
Infrastructure-as-a-Service should be mentioned too. IaaS goes a level deeper than PaaS and provides customers with very low-level configuration functionality; down to the specific hardware configurations in some cases. Examples include AWS, GCP, and UKCloud
SaaS
More recently, some very specific services, including SEO management services such as
keyword search tool functionality; redirect management, and web page index management functionality, provided as services. Keyword search tools are incredibly powerful and are often branded as Search-as-a-Service. Slightly confusingly, they use the same acronym as Software-as-a-Service; though the features are significantly different, the distinction will become very quickly apparent. This trend towards atomization of cloud-based services will likely continue. For example, services like APIaaS (API service), KaaS (Keyword research services); Cloud Computing, FaaS (cloud-based Financial services and Function as a Service), and a quick search on the web prove this true.