SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, CaaS, …

Explanation about all those terms

Presentation by Nicolas Vanhoren

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service
Physical stuff is so 80’s

• It’s virtual servers that are hosted for you

• You pay per server per hour

• You don’t care about the real physical servers of the real world

• You still need to configure everything on your servers ( like

operating systems )

• Examples: Amazon EC2, OVH, Digital Ocean

• A huge part of modern days Internet relies on IaaS on one level

or another
 PaaS: Platform as a Service
Because developers are lazy

• It provides an infrastructure to run you application

• You pay per application per server per hour

• « Virtual server » is sometimes named « Unit », « Dyno »,

« Bretzel », whatever…

• You don’t care about the configuration of the servers, you just
provide your application

• It can automatically scale for you

• Examples: Amazon Beanstalk, Heroku

 SaaS: Software as a Service
That thing everybody uses without knowing

• It’s software that is hosted for you

• You pay for the right to use the software through Internet

• Examples: GMail, Github,… If you can pay for it and it’s

on Internet it’s probably SaaS.

• Not so much used today as a marketing term. Was

mostly replaced by « Online version » or « Cloud ».
Relation between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

• Let’s imagine I want to create a super paid service to

send pictures of cats everyday by email to my clients and
I want to use Heroku to host it.

• I will be a SaaS provider as I ask people to pay to use my

service.

• Heroku will be a PaaS provider for me as I just send

them my application and they host it for me.

• Amazon will be the IaaS provider for Heroku. (Heroku

doesn’t have its own servers, it just uses Amazon EC2.)
CaaS: Container as a Service

• Some kind of a specialized version of PaaS

• It’s designed to host containers (Docker, Kubernetes…)

• You pay per container per hour

• Example: Amazon ECS

• Not much more to say, it’s PaaS for people that like using
Docker
 FaaS: Function as a Service

• Also kind of a specialized

PaaS, just more recent than
the alternatives

• You pay per request, servers

are allocated on the fly and
you don’t have to care about
them

• Examples: Amazon Lambda,

serverless HERE COMES A NEW
CHALLENGER
• Worth watching as it could be
the future of web develoment