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Choosing the Right Cloud Model or Friends Don’t Let Friends Do IaaS

March 12, 2024

As you look at how you move your organisation to the cloud, it has never been more important to understand the differences and benefits of the available cloud service models.

There is and will continue to be debates over the best model to choose for your organisation, but in essence it comes down to functionality, cost, effort, and purpose.

The current cloud models are usually categorised as:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – IaaS provides less management than on premises; the data centres, servers, networking are all provided by the vendor. It provides good functionality but all with a management effort and the overall cost tends to be higher than the other services. However, it can be quite low effort to implement and it does allow many organisations to speed up their market delivery.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – PaaS provides even more savings on management by dealing with the operating system, middleware, and runtime. PaaS delivers all the functionality of the cloud at a low cost; its fundamental purpose is to keep applications as close to the service providers cloud fabric as possible. However, it does take some effort to repurpose or reimagine applications versus implementing IaaS.

Software as a Service (SaaS) – SaaS provides a complete turnkey service that you just use. This is a very low effort, high functionality solution but with a cost dependant on the service chosen. Generally, SaaS does not offer much room to build on or customise, but many offerings do allow integration or some form of connectivity automation.

Functions as a Service (FaaS) – FaaS provides a new approach to development with the concept of serverless computing. This is an event-driven serverless compute platform that can also solve complex orchestration problems. Build and debug locally without additional setup. In effect FaaS is a new model for software development, but it is not suited to all scenarios. I would suggest that FaaS be considered as a specialist form of PaaS, while this is not strictly true it does help contextualise where it fits. Many solutions will use PaaS and FaaS together.

Cutting to the chase, SaaS enables the purchase of fully formed solutions that can address specific needs, such as accounting, email, etc. and the choice to use is straightforward, based on needs of the organisation. The simple part of SaaS is a turnkey solution that delivers today, and if the functionality matches…

However, when the choice is between hosting organisational applications or for delivering customer applications, some consideration is needed on whether to use IaaS or PaaS.

Generally, IaaS is a good way to move into the cloud without change and is in effect a rehosting delivery service. But the cloud is about change and with change comes opportunities for growth, becoming more cost effective and reviewing what is needed by your organisation.

PaaS generally offers the most efficient and cost-effective model for hosting different cloud solutions, everything from simple cloud-based apps to sophisticated, cloud-enabled enterprise applications. It does this as it takes advantage of cloud native options, to deliver a range of functionality and capabilities that don’t exist in IaaS.

So, what is the right answer?

As with many answers, it does depend. PaaS is the sweet spot for cloud delivery with FaaS for solutions that can use it to its full extent. There are solid roles for IaaS. PaaS really provides the core platform to build applications for the cloud, not just to run but to scale and embrace the cloud.

Join Black Marble as we share our knowledge and learnings in our Essential Guide to the Cloud series of webcasts and take advantage of our excellent white papers to help understand the process of success in cloud adoption. Contact businessdevelopment@blackmarble.com for any of our Essential Guide to the Cloud white papers, including “Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model”, “Positively Impacting your Organisation with Collaborative Working”, “Successful Software Delivery with DevOps”, and “Business Process Automation and Integration in the Cloud” or to be kept informed as each new paper is published.