Tuesday, February 16, 2010

SaaS, PaaS, IaaS

There are a lot of definitions here and there as to what SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS mean.

I wanted to simplify and put together a short list of definitions each with a vivid example of its kind. Finally, an excerpt from MIT Centennial on the whole Cloud Computing vision.

1. Software as a Service (SaaS): Application hosted in the cloud.
E.g: Gmail

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Application development environment and runtime hosted in the cloud.
E.g: Force.com 

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Developers/administrators obtain general computing, storage, messaging services.
E.g: Amazon AWS

Original vision of Utility/Grid Computing:

"If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility... The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry." John McCarthy, MIT Centennial in 1961.

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