IaaS vs. PaaS#

When you think about cloud computing models, IaaS and PaaS come into mind. AWS offers both.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows organizations to utilize AWS instead of owning and operating their own datacenter. You can simply rent VMs or physical servers from AWS.

IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service’ the fundamental aspect here is that Amazon Web Services manages the Infrastructure for you. They own and operate the data center and give the user VMs and other services at a fractional cost to the user.

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) on the other hand removes the need for your organization to manage the underlying platforms like a database, streaming services, etc. This allows you to focus on the deployment and management of your core applications and not worry about the IaaS and PaaS layers.

PaaS in turn, gets organizations to be more efficient and focused as you don’t need to worry about resource procurement, capacity planning, software maintenance, patching, or any of the other undifferentiated heavy lifting involved in running your application.

Amazon web services infrastructure

The Amazon Web Services Infrastructure consists of four primary areas which are a combination of IaaS and PaaS:

Compute (EC2, LightSail, ECS, Lambda, Batch)

Storage (EBS, EFS, S3, Glacier, Storage Gateway, Storage Migration Services)

Database (RDS, Redshift)

Network (CloudFront, VPC, Direct Connect, Load Balancing, Route 53)

In this course we will go into the details of the various services that would fall into one of these four main buckets.