What is Azure, cloud, SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS?
What is Azure, cloud, SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS in plain English ? I feel that a lot of times these terms get thrown around and new people can read the definition 10x and not really understand it. Here is my plain English understanding of these terms. Azure = Microsoft's "cloud". Competes with Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with other similar offerings from IBM, Salesforce, and Google. Cloud = All of the hardware, servers, physical storage of said hardware/storage/electricity are dealt with by someone else and live in a datacenter somewhere. You can see Microsoft's datacenter locations here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/ (You usually get to pick which datacenter you want by choosing which location you want when deploying something to Azure). SaaS = Software as a Service = "Here's a fully functioning piece of software that we are giving you to use as you like, just pay us a monthly fee for it. We will handle all se