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 setup, installation, and running of the software"
  • Examples: Office 365
PaaS = Platform as a Service = "We deal with the machine, licensing, and full infrastructure hosting your application, you just build the app and hand it to us and fill out a few input boxes for configuration like names, sizes, etc.."
  • Examples: Azure App Services, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, Azure Container Service, Azure Batch
IaaS = Infrastructure as a Service = "Here's a VM you can sign onto, you patch your own OS, figure out what size you need, and maintain it.  We will just give you the VM itself and host it on our server in our datacenter and guarantee you a certain percentage of up-time based on what you pay us + allow you to plugin easily with other Azure services."
  • Examples: Azure VMs, running SQL Server on a VM


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Electron JS, Visual Studio Code, and SQL Operations Studio

Image
Electron JS is a really cool framework that you can use to build  cross platform desktop apps using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript!!! Assuming you have the ability to build and test out the different platforms, it's very easy to deploy cross-platform.  Node.js is used for the backend runtime and the frontend is supported with Chromium.  This framework was created by, and is currently maintained by, GitHub.  There are a lot of well-known apps made from Electron, and you may be using them and not know it... keep reading to see.. There are some kickstarter guides to using it here: https://github.com/electron/electron-api-demos/blob/master/docs.md https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-to-build-your-first-app-with-electron-41ebdb796930 https://www.tutorialspoint.com/electron/electron_quick_guide.htm Visual Studio Code Visual Studio is generally liked and widely used with .NET developers, however there are a lot of complaints from both .NET and non .NET folk about it'
Read more

Unity vs. Unreal Engine

Image
Programming language choice(s): C#, JavaScript Cost : Free, if you make no money and do it for fun, however missing some feature that the Plus or Pro version has. To get Plus version, it will cost you $35/month for each person on the team. You have to take this option if you make $100,000+ revenue on your game, but less than $200,000. To get Pro version, it will cost you $125/month for each person on the team.  You will also be forced to choose this option if you make $200,000+  revenue on your game. This can forces you to try to predict ahead of time if you plan on making money off your game and how badly you really need those Pro features.  See the list of Plus and Pro features here:   https://store.unity.com/compare-plus-and-pro Strong points: Can create 2D or 3D games Excels in 2D or mobile games Can easily publish one game onto all platforms Insanely good asset store, you don't need to do any  Visual Studio integration (Unity comes packaged up with Visual Stu
Read more

Free & Paid Resources for Getting Started in IT

For those who are new to technology, it can be hard to find what resources exist.  I will put two asteriks** next to the ones I recommend most. But, most of all.. you need to build things! Build things, then put them up on GitHub. Build things alone, build things with friends, but once you get the basics down... go build things.  Free courses for beginners: CodinGame  - fun free way to start learning to code. Partially free, pay to get more, for beginners:  Code Academy ** - interactive learning programming, you have a goal to complete you try to write the correct code to complete the goal.  Then you move on to the next goal and it takes you through the series with hands on coding. Large catalog of in depth courses on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, Java, SQL, Ruby, Bash/Shell... Code School  - same as above. Has a wide range of langugages from Ruby, PHP, Python, Git, iOS stuff, JavaScript, HTML/CSS... Treehouse - same as above, but focuses mostly on web development. Free
Read more