PaaS and IaaS: Rising Champions of Cloud Computing

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Arthor Nichols.

In the cloud conversation, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) appear much less than the famed Software as a Service (SaaS). This is not surprising when you consider that a world already populated with built platforms and infrastructure has but to operate on them. However, offering Platforms and Infrastructure through the cloud has been a boon to the software development field, especially with the recently growing push toward increased collaboration between developers and admins, commonly referred to as Development Operations (DevOps).

Distinctions and Utilization

Though somewhat easy to confuse the two, it may be best to view PaaS as a subset of IaaS with fewer responsibilities in terms of provision of infrastructure. Specifically, choosing PaaS over IaaS moves the responsibility of managing the database, runtime, and middleware from an organization to the vendor of the service. PaaS and, to a lesser degree, IaaS are a direct route via the cloud to facilitating the work of software developers, though IaaS may be more desirable in cases where an organization has a suitable existing infrastructure and prefers more control over those elements…

Increasing Agility

Over recent years, the rise of DevOps has highlighted a push toward agile development, which is a model that favors multiple updates to software over a shorter period of time as opposed to the traditional waterfall method. Cloud computing and virtualization enhance this approach by speeding processes and increasing flexibility. In a quickly evolving business environment, agility is a most sought after quality…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudtweaks.com/2013/01/paas-and-iaas-rising-champions-of-cloud-computing/