XaaS

Traditional On Premise computing requires the company to take responsibility for sizing, acquiring, securing, and configuration of the Infrastructure (Servers, Networking Gear, and Physical Space). Once configured, the company is responsible for Operating the Infrastructure (Patching, Monitoring, Alerting, High Availability, Backup and Recovery, …​)

A cloud computing service that provides a basic computing platform, typically the hardware and virtual machine (VM) infrastructure (no operating system) or the hardware and an operating system. ^[1]

Containers as a service (CaaS) is a cloud service model that allows users to manage and deploy containers, applications and clusters through container-based virtualization. CaaS is highly useful to IT departments and developers in building secure and scalable containerized applications. With CaaS, this can be achieved using on-premises data centers or over the cloud.

CaaS provides an easy way to set up a container cluster. Orchestration, which essentially automates key IT functions, is an essential quality of CaaS technology. Google Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Rackspace Carina and Apache Mesos are all examples of CaaS orchestration platforms. Some public cloud CaaS providers include Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace and IBM.

CaaS is often considered to be a subset of IaaS (infrastructure as a service), but includes containers as its fundamental resource, as opposed to bare metal systems and virtual machines. ^[2]

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A cloud computing service that provides a comprehensive computing environment. PaaS includes the hardware, operating system, database and other necessary software for the execution of applications. It may include a complete development environment as well. PaaS is a step up from "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS), which provides only the servers and operating systems. ^[3]

A cloud computing service in which the customer pays for each function executed rather than a full server or part of a server (a virtual machine) that may be idle periodically. For example, the time required to execute the code that updates a record in a database would be charged to the serverless computing customer. Servers are indeed used, but the term implies "function as a service" (FaaS) rather than "infrastructure as a service" (see IaaS) or "platform as a service" (see PaaS). ^[4]

Software that is rented rather than purchased. Instead of buying applications and paying for periodic upgrades, SaaS is subscription based, and upgrades are automatic during the subscription period. When that expires, the software is no longer valid. Ideal for Cloud Computing SaaS can be implemented with local applications that expire after a certain time, but it is ideally suited for cloud computing and applications that run in any desktop or mobile device, no matter the OS. In this model, the applications are maintained in the provider’s datacenter, and every time users launch their browsers or apps and log on, they get the latest version. In addition, user data can also be stored in the cloud. ^[5]

IaaS can be thought of as running solutions in the cloud providers data center instead of our datacenter. The primary benefits are the near infinity ability to scale quickly.

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CaaS is the next level of Virtualization. Virtual machines have complete copies of an operating system and run on a hypervisor. Virtual Machines use significantly more resources compared to Container Technology. Containers share an underlying OS Kernal and contain only the minimum additional components. Containers are typically much lighter weight and faster compared to virtual machines,

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PaaS is an opinionated Application Infrastructure Framework that enable Development Speed. While opinionated, PaaS is still relatively flexible.

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FaaS is the Newest of the "aaS" solutions. FaaS further extends the capabilities and benefits of PaaS.

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SaaS evolved out of Application Service Providers and is the most mature and well known of the "aaS"s.

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The below represents, at a high level, where an application should run in the cloud.

Containers are the preferred approach for making application deployment and Dev/Ops fundamental to all applications and their teams. There are things to take into account when making your decision to modify your application to run in a container. Provided below is a decision tree to help with making this determination.