A cloud service provider CSP is a company that offers some component of cloud computing:
- infrastructure as a service (IaaS),
- software as a service (SaaS)
- platform as a service (PaaS)
Customers will purchase an increasing variety of services from cloud service providers today. As mentioned above, the most common categories of cloud-based services include IaaS, SaaS and PaaS.
IaaS
IaaS providers. In the IaaS model, the cloud service provider delivers infrastructure components that would otherwise exist in an on-premises data center. These components could consist of servers, storage and networking as well as the virtualization layer, which the IaaS provider hosts in its own data center. Cloud service providers may also complement their IaaS products with services such as monitoring, security, load balancing and storage resiliency.
SaaS
SaaS providers. SaaS vendors currently offer a wide array of business technologies, such as productivity suites, customer relationship management (CRM) software and human resources management (HRM) software, all of which the SaaS vendor hosts and provides over the internet. Many traditional software vendors now sell cloud-based options of their on-premises software products.
PaaS
PaaS providers. The third type of cloud service provider, PaaS vendors, offers cloud infrastructure and services that users can access to perform various functions. PaaS products are commonly used in software development. In comparison to an IaaS provider, PaaS providers will add more of the application stack, such as operating systems and middleware, to the underlying infrastructure.
PaaS can be delivered in three ways:
- As a public cloud service from a provider, where the consumer controls software deployment with minimal configuration options, and the provider provides the networks, servers, storage, operating system (OS), middleware (e.g. Java runtime, .NET runtime, integration, etc.), database and other services to host the consumer’s application.
- As a private service (software or appliance) behind a firewall.
- As software deployed on a public infrastructure as a service.
FaaS
Platform as a service (PaaS) application hosting services are similar to FaaS in that they also hide “servers” from developers. However, such hosting services typically always have at least one server process running that receives external requests. Scaling is achieved by booting up more server processes, which the developer is typically charged directly for. Consequently, scalability remains visible to the developer.[5]
By contrast, FaaS does not require any server process constantly being run. While an initial request may take longer to be handled than an application hosting platform (up to several seconds[6]), caching may enable subsequent requests to be handled within milliseconds. As developers only pay for function execution time (and no process idle time), lower costs at higher scalability can be achieved (at the cost of latency).
At Softreck Company we offer our own FaaS and PaaS Cloud Computing solutions.
