IaaS vs. SaaS vs. Paas? How do the types of Cloud computing services differ?

Cloud computing comes in three service delivery categories:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): where virtual servers and storage, as well as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), are provided by a vendor (e.g., AWS). This allows users to migrate their workload to a virtual machine (VM). The available storage capacity can be started, stopped, accessed or configured as desired.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): In this Cloud computing model, development tools are hosted on the company’s own infrastructures. Users can access them via APIs, web portals or gateway software. Well-known representatives of PaaS products are the Lightning platform from Salesforce, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): In this Cloud service (often also called web service), software applications are provided via the Internet. Users can access this SaaS application from any location – as long as they have an Internet connection. This works by giving them access to databases and the application software. A common SaaS service that everyone is familiar with is Microsoft 365.

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