Cloud Computing Categories

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:

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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.