SaaS, PaaS and IaaS explained in one graphic
And how the original Pizza-as-a-Service illustration is wrong.
The Pizza-as-a-Service metaphor was firstly introduced by Albert Barron in 2014 as a visualization of the differences between Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-service (SaaS). At first sight it looks brilliant — but if you look in depth, it falls apart. This diagram wants to illustrate that you need to do less and less, but the items that are listed and increasingly “outsourced” don’t fit the comparison. I’ll look at the services in the original diagram and suggest a better comparison for people who want to choose which services to use.
A good visualization of a false concept.
The basic concept is in each case you get a pizza, though in some cases, you do all of the work; in other cases you have other people do the work for you.
- Traditional On-Premises Deployment: Made at Home
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Take and Bake
- Platform-as-a-Service: Pizza Delivery
- Software-as-a-Service: Dining out
In the diagram, the amount of work you do is in the following order:
Made at home > Take and bake > Pizza delivery > Dining out
Let’s focus on two stages first: if “Traditional On-Premises Deployment = Made at home”, why does “Infrastructure-as-a-Service = Take and bake”?
At first glance, it means that the service provider gives you a pre-made pizza, so you can bake it in your own kitchen without making a mess. However, this is not how Infrastructure-as-a-Service differs from Traditional On-Premises Deployment.
The X-aaS concept should be interpreted the other way round.
Rather than thinking of the consumer doing less and less, let’s think about a product that is increasingly customizable because less is pre-made by the service provider.
By adopting an X-aaS, you don’t need to worry about a certain “X” — be it infrastructure, platform, software or pizza. Instead of forcing the X-aaS model into existing pizza services, I will be dissecting the steps to making an increasingly customized pizza.
Enjoy your packaged meal: Pizza-as-a-Service.
Pizza-as-a-Service means you can enjoy a pizza (a fully finished product) upon order. You call the pizza delivery so the pizza is already designed, prepared and baked by somebody else and arrives hot and ready to eat.
In the world of SaaS, we only need to sign up to use the service. We can customize some features, layouts, or users (pizza toppings), but we never need to worry about the deployment and framework the project is used (just like how the service providers put our orders together for us). It also means we can’t choose this brand of cheese over that, or how long they choose to bake it for. If you don’t like their crust, you’ll have to choose another company.
So what should be the service layer right below Pizza-as-a-Sevice?
Semi-customized: Ready-to-cook.
The idea of “take-and-bake” in the original diagram was close, but it misses a few key ideas. The take-and-bake doesn’t allow customization, which is what IaaS and PaaS offer. IaaS and PaaS take care of some backend things you don’t want to deal with, and probably come with API’s, but you choose what you can add.
Instead of a “take-and-bake”, the next level down is more like walking into a kitchen with a ready-to-cook package of ingredients. IaaS and PaaS are when you want to make your own pizza, but you don’t need to worry about buying ingredients, prep work, or having the right tools. You can focus on rolling out the dough, assembling the pre-washed ingredients to your taste and factors like size and thickness before sticking it into someone’s provided oven.
If you use IaaS or PaaS, you can focus on your own business logic and implement your user interface on a reliable platform. The service provider manages the hosting and hardware technologies for you.
This option might not be suitable for every end-user. At least you need some pizza-making skills to turn the dough into a pizza.
Fully customized: Kitchen-as-a-Service.
Kitchen equipment is infrastructural investment. For engineers, this is where your code runs. It also includes all the infrastructure you need (such as runtime, storage, networking). Without it, your product doesn’t go anywhere, but on the other hand, it doesn’t affect the nature of the product itself.
For a pizza, the next layer below is buying your own ingredients to prepare exactly the pizza you want, with the specific brands you like. But you don’t have to worry about the oven, rolling pin, whether you counter is big enough, or the pizza cutter.
Now, you have absolute control on what pizza you are going to make, but maybe the rental kitchen doesn’t have every type of tool you want.
Fully in-house: Prepare ingredients + cooking equipment from scratch.
For hard core pizza makers — not only will you want to choose all your pizza ingredients and make it from scratch, you will also want complete control of all the tools in your kitchen: the oven that has the exact settings and capabilities you want, the pizza stone many places don’t have, or let your dough sit overnight at the most optimal corner of your fridge. And finally, you can drizzle that homemade chilli oil on top and savor it fresh out of the oven.
You may think that’s overkill — but in real world, sometimes the effort is necessary if you can’t find a service that will let you customize for that one essential deployment setting, such as a firewall configuration or that specific network setting requirements.
Examples of IaaS, Paas, and SaaS.
SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)
- You can sign up and use the software directly: e.g. Zendesk, Paypal, even more customer-oriented ones like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
- You can build your software on top of the platform: e.g. Heroku, SalesForce, Google App Engine
- Besides building everything from the platform level, you can also leverage the benefits from some Backend-as-a-Service in the market. E.g. Skygear, Firebase, Kii, Kinvey
IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service)
- Provides you some place (virtual machines) to deploy your app. e.g. Amazon Web Service EC2, Digital Ocean, RackSpace Cloud
On-Premises Deployment
- So you have your own datacenter and servers — it’s completely customized
IaaS and PaaS save us a huge amount of preparation work, so we can customize our “pizza“ and bake it fast. The best type of service is whatever suits your product best.
Hope these examples clear up these concepts.
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