Comparing and contrasting IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

To prepare for the Cloud Digital Leader exam, you must have a firm understanding of the differences between the different hosting environments and their tradeoffs. We’ll be diving deeper into the models across the following variables: total cost of ownership (TCO), flexibility, shared responsibilities, operational level, and staffing and expertise.

We’ll start by digging into the three core models: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. From there, we’ll touch on Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), as highlighted by the following breakdown:

Figure 3.1 — Client versus cloud provider responsibility matrix (source: https://cloud.google.com/learn/paas-vs-iaas-vs-saas)

Let’s check them out.

IaaS

IaaS is a cloud computing service model that delivers on-demand infrastructure resources to organizations via the cloud, such as compute, storage, networking, and virtualization...