Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the three important service tiers offered by cloud providers: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. We started with a basic understanding of all three, discussed the different levels of abstraction they offer, and talked about their fitment in specific scenarios. Balancing the needs of the organization, its current cloud skills, and its business goals are key to ensuring that the right service tier is adopted for a particular software stack or team.

We then went on to discuss typical cloud operating models that can co-exist in any organization. In the context of two real-life scenarios, we discussed how software developers leveraged AWS PaaS and IaaS offerings on two separate occasions. Sometimes, it also makes sense to adopt a readymade solution to a common problem by leveraging SaaS solutions. This helps avoid undifferentiated heavy lifting and allows the developers to focus on real customer problems and business use cases.

In the next chapter, we will...