IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and AaaS
Clouds (public and private) are made up of physical servers, storage, I/O, and network-
ing combined with software, management tools, metrics, best practices, policies, and
people that are housed in a facility somewhere. Depending on the type of service being
provided, the servers may be running hypervisors to support a given type of virtual
machine or several different types, for example, a mix of VMware VMDK, Microsoft
VHD, Citrix, and OVF. In addition to hypervisors, servers may be configured with
database instances, networking tools, Web serving tools, PaaS or middleware tools,
and APIs, along with storage management tools. Storage management tools range from
basic file systems to object-based access with multiple protocol support including NFS,
HTTP, FTP, REST, SOAP, and Torrent. In the PaaS layer, support could be for a par-
ticular environment such as .NET or VMware Spring Source.
In Chapter 1 some examples were given of cloud services and providers from a high
level. Not all cloud service providers are the same; some focus on specific functional-
ities or personalities while others have diverse offerings. Cloud personalities mean what
the cloud can do, such as enable email as a service or compute as a service or VMs as a
service or storage or file sharing, backup and recovery, archiving or BC/DR.
Other personalities include social media, collaboration, and photo or audio sharing,
which often get lumped under the SaaS or AaaS model. If you back up up your com-
puter or smart phone to a service such as ATT, Carbonite, EMC Mozy, Iron Mountain,
Rackspace Jungledisk, Seagate i365, or Sugarsync, you are accessing a SaaS or AaaS
cloud. If you use a Web expense reporting tool such as Concur, you are using a cloud.
If you use Google Gmail or Microsoft Live office, you are using a SaaS cloud. If you are
developing a big data analytics application using hadoop and other open-source tools
leveraging a site such as Amazon, Google, or Rackspace, you are using a cloud and a
mix of IaaS and PaaS. If those same types of functionality are sourced from your own
facilities or systems, you are using a private cloud. If others are using the same service
but you are not sharing data or information, you are using a public cloud. If your
private cloud relies on an IaaS public provider such as Amazon, AT&T, and Google,
Rackspace, Iron Mountain, VCE, or others for remote storage or VM hosting, you are
using a hybrid cloud. Figure 12.2 shows private, hybrid, and public clouds along with
IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS layer focus.
Something that is occurring with clouds is that, at the IaaS layer, different vendors
and providers are maneuvering their tools to support environments such as physical
servers and storage along with converged networking and hypervisors. At the IaaS layer
the objective is to support both new and existing environments and applications. At the
PaaS layer there is the need to support existing applications while establishing how new
systems will be developed and deployed in the future. Consequently, at the PaaS layer,
there is more of a focus on the tools, the development environment, APIs, and SDKs in
order to manage and support what gets developed now and in the future. This is similar
to decisions made in the past about what languages, development environments, and
runtime bindings or environments would be selected. While some applications may be
short-lived, and today’s tools allow new applications to be deployed faster, many appli-
cations need to continue to run for many years or longer.
It is important to pay attention to what is going on with the PaaS or middleware
layer for new development, as those applications are what will be needing support in
your private or a public cloud on a go-forward basis. The golden rule of clouds is similar
to the golden rule of virtualization: Whoever controls the management, which includes
the development environment, controls the gold.
