Cloud Services Explained: Powering Your Business

Updated: Nov 6

Clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network.

On the other hand, cloud services are the delivery of IT resources over a network accessible to users on demand, usually via the Internet. It’s pretty common that when referring to cloud services, what we’re talking about is cloud computing services and types of cloud services such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) software as a service (SaaS), and Function as a service (FaaS).

What are cloud services?

It might be broad but cloud services can be considered anything that requires infrastructure, platforms, software, and technologies accessed through the internet without additional software download.

Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, and software provided by third parties over the internet to companies. That’s where cloud computing services come in. These “as-a-service” solutions each deliver a different subset of resources.

Cloud computing is the act itself (delivery of IT resources such as storage, management, networking, and software over the internet) and the cloud service is the offering of cloud computing service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, FaaS)

What are the benefits of cloud services?

Operating in the cloud makes data flow from front-end users with cloud services easier. The cloud promotes the creation of cloud-native applications and therefore the flexibility of working in the cloud.

How do cloud services work?

How do Cloud services work? Like most IT solutions, cloud services require hardware and software. But unlike traditional hardware and software solutions, cloud services only need a computer, an OS, and a network connection to access cloud services.

Clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. They allow for cloud computing to take place which is essentially running workloads within a cloud environment.

Cloud Infrastructure

The idea of infrastructure can feel a little misleading. When cloud service providers, say AWS, supply users, say you, what’s going on is they’re detaching (or decoupling) computing capabilities from hardware components. Redhat uses a neat example like this one:

Processing power from central processing units (CPUs)

Active memory from random access memory (RAM) chips

Graphics from graphics from graphics processing units (GPUs)

Data storage availability from data centers or hard drives.

The abstraction of all these components is enabled by virtualization and virtual machines.

Once severed or separated, these storage, computing, and networking capabilities are served, provided, and offered to users over the internet, as infrastructure, or IaaS.

Benefits of IaaS

Infrastructure-as-a-Service, for example, provides users with computing, networking, and storage resources. Since these services can be accessed from the internet, there’s no need to manage or update the software or hardware required to run the service or application.

Reasonably priced: there’s no need to pay for hardware and software and is charged exclusively for its hourly, weekly, or monthly use.
Safe: Using IaaS can provide even greater security than the one currently available to you.
Maintenance-free: updates to the service are deployed ubiquitously with no extra installation or maintenance required.

IaaS Providers:

Amazon Web Services, Google compute Engine, Microsoft Azure.

Cloud Platforms

Cloud platforms require more than abstracting a computer’s capabilities. Cloud platforms need an added layer focusing on containerization, orchestration, routing, security, management, APIs, and automation. UX/UI is also important, especially in creating an easily navigable experience.

Cloud platforms are a type of Platform as a service. So long as their infrastructure components are scalable and sharable (virtual machines), they could be considered a cloud. The best examples of these are public clouds and managed private clouds.

A PaaS hosts IT resources (hardware and software) for developers to build services and applications. Better yet, these aren’t only accessed over the internet but deployed over the internet which in turn means no hardware needed for deployment. The user, developers in this case, don’t need to manage or update the underlying infrastructure (servers, operating systems, storage, networks, etc.) instead are in charge of overviewing the developed project or application over the PaaS.

Public cloud providers

These abstract their own infrastructure, platforms, and apps from the hardware they own, pool them into data lakes and share them with many tenants. These offer public cloud services, cloud-based operating systems OS, or libraries of development templates (frameworks). AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud.

Managed private clouds

These serve customers as a private cloud that is deployed, configured, and managed by someone other than the customer. It’s mainly for customers with low IT staff or underskilled teams.

Benefits of PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service on the other hand, provides a platform for applications to run, as well as all the IT needed for it to run (IT in this case, would be all the resources an IaaS offers)

Ease of use: since users can access the infrastructure and services provided by the PaaS over the internet, there’s no need for local troubleshooting
Fair price: users are usually charged on the use they have of the platform instead of software and hardware costs.
End-to-end support: PaaS is specifically built to provide a robust environment for each stage of application development: build, test, deploy, manage, and update.

PaaS Providers:

AWS Lambda, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud

Cloud Software

The cloud service providers can offer is a full web application, (aka cloud software or SaaS). This requires the most amount of investment because the cloud provider is providing an online app to customers.

Cloud software is provided using a cloud-native approach. This approach is an application infrastructure that combines several small, independent, loosely coupled microservices.

Microservices can be packaged into Linux containers that can be managed by a container orchestration engine like Kubernetes. The final product is a cloud app that can be optimized by microservices without impacting other microservices that, together, make up the whole app. (Which is what happens on monolithic infrastructure)

Benefits of SaaS

Software as a Service is another cloud computing solution that offers the user a cloud application, the platforms on which it runs, and the platforms underlying infrastructure (again, the infrastructure would be computing, networking, and storage resources) The business model behind SaaS is usually on a pay-as-you-go basis for users who purchase the software solution. These solutions are generally accessed from web browsers.

Cost-effectiveness: Users only pay for what they use
Timely: It’s much faster to access software that runs on itself rather than having to configure and install it for yourself.
Accessible: the app's data is accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
Real-time Updates: SaaS deploy their updates ubiquitously so users don’t have to update them themselves.
Scalability: SaaS providers get to create a broader offering by delivering on-demand

SaaS Providers

Adobe, Zoom Asana, Shopify

Other types of cloud computing

FaaS

Last comes Function-as-a-Service, this is an event-driven execution model for developers where that allows them to run, build, and manage app packages as functions without maintaining the IT. Once the application is fully developed in a serverless container, all that comes next is to trigger the event that executes the code. FaaS is similar in several ways to PaaS, but one of the main differences is that FaaS scales up or down on demand.

Benefits of FaaS

Scalability: As mentioned above, once the trigger event executes the code, scaling is provided on-demand.
Fair Pricing: this is charged exclusively on the events executed
Flexibility: functions are written in any code

FaaS Providers

AWS Lambda, OpenFaaS, IBM Cloud Functinos

Migrate and Modernize your IT with managed cloud services

Migration and modernization. These two are the repeated benefits of operating with cloud services or cloud computing services by every client who’s had the chance to experience the accelerated rate of innovation with AWS firsthand. For companies looking to unlock secure and agile scalability for their workloads, AWS cloud services is the unbeatable solution. Their library of cloud computing services is vast and robust which make them readily applicable to any kind of business, especially those with a technological background.

On the other hand, for those without such traits, we can’t leave the conversation with mentioning the relevance a cloud migration to AWS has to offer. A cloud migraition can often promise to unravel a whole new layer of innovation to any given business. Luckily we’ve been happy to prove such daring statements in offering cloud migration services to companies who already inhabited the cloud and those who were initially on-premise.

Why choose Teracloud for cloud services?

Teracloud’s services include accelerating time to value and reducing operational cost and complexity of delivering cloud-native applications. As part of the AWS Partner Network, our offering is intricately related to AWS cloud services. Build and scale your business applications across hybrid cloud environments while we manage the rest.