ELI5 Paas, Iaas, Serverless computing

There are many offerings to simplify deployments of code in the cloud, abstracting away the hardship of working on bare metal machines. The different solutions are categorized under different groups, which sometimes confused me, so I’ll try to make the distinctions clearer.

PaaS #

PaaS stands for Platform as a Service, which means that a provider offers a platform for developers to build, run, and manage their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Think of it like a playground where you can go and play with different equipment without having to worry about how it works or how it was built. In the same way, developers can use PaaS to build and deploy applications without having to worry about the underlying servers, operating systems, or other infrastructure components.

We can take as examples Heroku, Fly.io, Render, Digital Ocean App Platform, Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, etc…

IaaS #

IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service, which means that a provider offers a virtual infrastructure to the users. It’s like renting an empty lot where you can build your own house from scratch. In IaaS, developers have complete control over the infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking, and operating systems. This gives developers more flexibility and control, but also requires more expertise and management.

Some examples could be AWS, GPC, Azure, etc…

Serverless #

Serverless computing is a newer type of cloud computing that allows developers to run their code without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. It’s like having a restaurant where you don’t have to worry about cooking the food or serving it to the customers. In serverless computing, developers only pay for the computing resources used by their code, rather than paying for a fixed amount of resources all the time. This makes it more cost-effective and scalable than traditional computing models.

Examples of this are AWS Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, etc…

In summary, PaaS is like a playground where developers can build and deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, IaaS is like renting an empty lot where developers have complete control over the infrastructure, and serverless computing is like having a restaurant where developers only have to worry about their code and not the underlying infrastructure.