Azure Series #2: Infrastructure Layer — IAAS | PAAS | SAAS | Serverless
This article is a part of Azure multi-part series (parent article). The previous part of the article — Azure Series #1: Security Layer — 2. Network — Protection and Next part of the article — Azure Series #2: 4 Layer Infrastructure to design for 1 to several millions of users, data & functionality .
On-Premise
Real World Example: This is like owning a car. All the “Maintenances” that is required for the car must be done by your or you can hire a vendor to do the maintenance. The ownership of the car is yours. You can have your own Depreciation cycle and can replace or replenish the Hardware. All the contents that you put in the hardware (based on any specific core licenses) is your call. You can either host your own Data Centre or you can hire a rack in a huge data centre (a farm) and have your servers / hired servers hosted in there. On-Premise Data centres for Primary and Secondary works the same way.
On Azure: Azure Stack enables many of the cloud services to be deployed on-premise. Azure Stack comes with preconfigured rack with network, compute and storage. organizations can run Virtual machines, containers, Storage and few variant of databases on premise as you will deploy in the public cloud. As Azure is promoting Hybrid infrastructure big time, Azure Arc is becoming the go to product for hybrid infrastructure (On-premise +multi cloud) that provides links to multiple on-premise and cloud resources.
Cloud
IAAS — Infrastructure As A Service
Real World Example: This is like HIRING / LEASING a car. All the “Maintenances” that is required for the car during the period of lease must be undertaken by you. Once the car is returned, it is not your responsibility any more. You do not own the car.
On Azure: You lease an Instance and deploy your services in that instance. As long as you pay for the service and you use it, it is yours. No one else can get access to that area. Under the shared responsibility model, all the Data / Resources / Users you create / Network traffic / Patching & upgrading etc., is your responsibility. Hardware maintenance / Networking / Switches is Azure’s responsibility.
PAAS — Platform As A Service
Real World Example: This is like a TAXI. You hire a taxi to travel from Point A to Point B and pay for the “Metered” use of the Taxi.
On Azure: Azure Service provider delivers platform to clients, enabling them to develop applications on them.
SAAS — Software As A Service
Real World Example: This is like getting TICKETS in a Bus. Depends on the number of tickets / seats you purchase, you will be charged accordingly. Certain bookings may have a minimum booking requirement.
On Azure: Application comes pre-built on cloud where you can pay for the number of seats required and use the software where you can input the data and process it. Configuration and Rules setting according to your needs, configuring the fields usually will be allowed in few of the SAAS.
Serverless:
Real World Example: Ride-share using Uber or Grab is equivalent analogy for Serverless. You don’t have to worry about how much mileage the care will give, breaking system, security etc. All you have to make sure is the ride can take you from point A to B without any issue and you can opt for any additional services the ride provider may provide.
On Azure: Any fully managed service in the Azure stack is pretty much a serverless service. You do not have to spin up and maintain any server / service on your own — it will be auto managed by Azure. For serverless it is not a debate between whether we should go for a serverless approach or server based approach. Even if you go for complete server based few of the services can be serverless in your technology stack such as Function, Application server, serverless Kubernetes etc.
For other articles refer to luxananda.medium.com.
