Comparing and understaning Cloud Computing Service Models with a traditional environment can be helpful in cloud journey decision.

But which model can you embrace…and why ?

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS are three models allow you to manage some parts of your infrastructure, or nothing at all. Let’s doing an analogy with Pizza.

In a traditional infrastructure, following pizza recipe of course, we need to buy whatever we need to make an home pizza-making (cheese, tomato, dough) and we need to consume our oven, fire, electricity and Gas, Drinks, etc…and transported to IT reality, this means buy servers, racks, disks and having an high consume of electricity, conditioning to keep low server temperatures, and if something goes wrong, replacing faulty hardware parts by calling hardware vendor and get support after days.

I tell you a secret, I like home pizza-making or home bread-making by myself.

Embracing IaaS model, you need to buy a prepared pizza, at the supermarket for example, bake yourself, consume your drinks and enjoy your pizza at your dining table. So, in the cloud means you don’t have worry about physical servers, electricity, conditioning, and replacing faulty hardware parts, but you only need to buy your Virtual Machine from your provider and use it for your applications. You still need to manage Operating system, patch it, your applications and patch them.

If you simply want to eat pizza delivered at home, at your dining table with your drinks, PaaS is the model you need to choose. Example for PaaS services are SAP Cloud Platform, Google App Engine, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, WordPress that offer a platform to build your apps or website simply using your browser and publish your application or website directly to final users. Everything under your dining table and your drinks, it’s not your problem. You do not need to manage Operating Systems anymore, but you still need to manage your applications and patch or correct them.

Final model, SaaS, is for those people don’t like to dine at home and make the kitchen dirty, so, what do they do? Book a table in their favourite pizzeria and go to dining out. Issue solved! Clean Kitchen and electricity saved. There are many examples in IT world of Software as A Service, some of them are Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Canva, ClickUp, Dropbox, Zoom, Trello, and so on. You do not need to manage nothing, but only connect to your application and start using it. Stop!

Hope this article will be helpful and clarify you about Cloud Service Models and their different responsability. By Loving both home pizza-making, Ordering it, or Dining it Out, it made me easy and fun to explain you the analogy of Cloud Models with Pizza.

Thanks for reading.