The three tiers of cloud offerings

Everything is offered as a service these days. You might have come across several terms such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which are part of a bigger trend of offering X as a service. Hosting all the hardware and software components of your application stack on-premises requires a lot of effort and time. However, you can selectively offload some of these components to the cloud.

AWS and other cloud providers abstract the underlying infrastructure and platform, thereby only exposing what the end-users want to use. The interesting part is that some of these offerings have now extended beyond the service provider’s data center and are offered as a managed service, directly running in customers’ on-premises environments in racks managed by AWS. This new cloud trend of hybrid-deployment models is evolving in several domains such as containers, databases, and end-user computing.

Let’s have a look into the differentiating capabilities...