I spent a day this week at an Oracle Cloud Computing event in Minneapolis. One of the interesting points made was a distinction between various types of cloud computing. I hadn’t thought much about it before, but I think it’s a really useful model to help people start to understand the new and somewhat amorphous world of cloud computing. The categories are as follows:
SaaS – Software as a Service – These are applications that a user can access via the web and don’t require much or any customer configuration. Examples here include Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, and Zoho.
PaaS – Platform as a Service – Platforms (like app servers) are provided by a cloud vendor and the customer can create custom applications and deploy them.
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service – Essentially virtual machines are delivered, and the customer installs software on those virtual machines.
I have had some truble making the distinctions sometimes. If salesforce.com is saas, then would force.com be considered pass because you can build custom apps on the platform?