Anything as a Service (XaaS) Age

We Need to go Deeper!

Earlier in this post, we discussed various additions on top of IaaS and mentioned that they can also be separate Cloud offerings. During all these years of Cloud development and evolution, Cloud Providers realized that multiple auxiliary IT resources and functions can be also provided to complement IaaS and they can significantly influence the performance, enable different features, ensure security,  define availability, scalability, reliability, and, of course, the price.

Cloud Storage, also known as “StaaS” (Storage as a Service) – is an integral part of any Cloud infrastructure. There are multiple storage types available, and they can be used for different purposes, starting from “hot” data processing with high Read/Write rates where speed/throughput is crucial to “cold” storage where the price per Gb matters more, and the data is not frequently used (for backups or not critical data).Samples of StaaS: AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Persistent Disk, etc.

Storages usually differ from each other based on the following parameters:

• Type of stored data (block, file, object)
• Disk type (HDD, SSD)
• IOPS / Throughput / Latency
• Available size
• Access frequency
• Reliability (based on data redundancy on multiple physical disks)
• Data protection features (encryption at rest and in transit)

Database as a Service (DbaaS) – managed by a Cloud, Provider DB engine is used to reduce the overhead of managing the DB by a DBA (Database Administrator), in this case, all administration activities like database maintenance, upgrade, backup and even provisioning licenses are borne by your Cloud provider. Different DbaaS offerings mostly vary from each other by types of DB engines they support:

• SQL – Azure SQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, etc. 
• NoSQL – DynamoDB, CosmosDB, Google Cloud Bigtable, DocumentDB, etc.

For those who just need to deploy a simple function without provisioning any IT resources, there is a special lightweight service type – FaaS (Function as a Service), such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM Cloud Functions. Usually, it is some runtime environment available instantly and limited to some particular time of execution and available RAM amount & Compute processing power. This approach – complete abstraction from any infrastructure and pricing based on actual resource consumption by a simple application that performs only one function (usually as a microservice), is also known as Serverless computing.

What Else can be aaS?

Well, actually anything you could think of as an IT asset or related to its service, let’s list down them and describe the basic features of each:

• BMaaS (Bare-metal as a service) – most close to “dedicated server” cloud offering when you can use a whole metal server without sharing it with any other client. Can be a suitable option for BYOL (Bring Your Own License) cases (e.g. when the license is tied to physical CPU/motherboard)
• DaaS (Desktop as a Service) – virtualized desktop available from the Cloud
• NaaS (Network as a Service) – multiple various connectivity options, starting from Site-to-Site VPN to a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO)
• B/MBaaS – Backend/Mobile Backend as a Service – set of commonly used backend features such as notification services integration, cloud storage adaptors, APIs to social networks, etc. 
• APIaaS (API as a Service) – set of tools that allow developing web APIs
• UCaaS  (Unified Communication as a Service) – platform with integrated communication capabilities that allow creating a single communication stack of services such as voice- & video-calls and conferencing, instant messaging & chats, contact centers, collaboration workspaces, etc.
• SECaaS (Security as a Service) – a family of different security-related services starting from Cloud Firewalls and Network Access Control Lists (NACL) to encryption and vulnerability analysis.
• MaaS (Monitoring as a Service) – managed monitoring applications integrated into other Cloud solutions.
• Backup/Recovery/DR as a Service – sometimes it is provided as an optional part of IaaS. Still, there are some special Cloud solutions that offer extended data protection and recovery procedures with guaranteed lower RPO/RTO.

The list above is definitely not exhaustive and there are more types of Cloud/subscription-based types of services even bizarre ones, like Malware as a Service and new types are yet to be “invented” for sure.

Conclusion

In general, the separation between types of XaaS is conditional, sometimes we do not even notice the difference between them using multiple online services both at work and at home – Social Media (Communication & Content as a Service), Netflix & Spotify (Content as a Service), Skype (Communication as a Service), Uber & Grab – (Transportation or Delivery as a Service), Google Maps (Maps as a Service). Most of these terms are introduced by marketing departments to have a richer portfolio of offerings, not even necessarily IT-related.

Clouds provide building blocks of different sizes and shapes to design and construct IT systems for your own business or to offer to your clients as another XaaS offering. You should understand what each of them means and how to combine them together into a single Cloud Solution with all possible features and parameters that define the right balance of functionality and costs that will bring benefit to your business.