As cloud computing dominates more and more aspects of the tech world, similar-sounding but confusingly different something-as-a-service acronyms keep piling up. You've probably heard of SaaS (Software as a Service), since it applies mostly to cloud services delivered to end users. 

But what about IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)? Even many tech professionals can't explain the differences without babbling incoherently. 

Fortunately, this new infographic from IaaS provider ProfitBricks does a good job of explaining the differences and who uses which one for what. Enjoy.

Guest author Lucas Carlson is the founder and CEO of AppFog.

2012 was a huge year for the cloud, providing developers with a bounty of both public and private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options.

Enterprise developers quickly understood the benefits of the cloud, and sunk their teeth into porting projects onto public infrastructure, experimenting with PaaS, developing cloud-based dev/test solutions and incorporating all kinds of SaaS offerings into their daily workflow.

While this is all very exciting for developers, rampant cloud adoption can be a headache for enterprise IT departments. They need to manage, govern and control cloud adoption or deal with chaos.

Uncontrolled Cloud Growth Creates Cloud Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is what happens when enterprise IT and the lines of business it supports all simultaneously but independently employ a variety of cloud services in an uncoordinated fashion.

The business groups could be running apps across a half-dozen different runtimes and using an equal number of different database technologies - some on-premise on a VMware vSphere cloud, others experimenting with OpenStack and some on Rackspace OpenCloud across various regions and zones. The rest could be using Amazon’s public cloud - in Virginia or perhaps Singapore.

In some cases, the enterprise pays for the cloud services. But in many cases, individuals are simply using their personal credit cards and expensing the costs. It’s the Wild Wild West!

Not surprisingly, IT leaders are conflicted. On one hand, they’re inspired by the drive and creativity of their development teams. And they love the velocity of development and releases, and the innovation that results. But they are positively horrified by the thought of making it all work together: “If my department has an app in development on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we need it on our private cloud. Who’s going to make that happen? How much time are we talking here?”

From Cloud Sprawl To Cloud Sanity?

Cloud sanity means having one deployment and management solution responsible for the wide range of app lifecycle processes, including app deployment, deletion, starting/stopping, database service provisioning and tunneling, cloning and re-deploying apps across infrastructures, memory management and more.

It also means having one solution for deploying to AWS, and for migrating from Azure to OpenStack, and for creating new PostgresQL databases, and for syncing up distributed systems through RabbitMQ… well, you get the idea. Right now, sadly, most companies have a single tool (or more commonly each employee has their own version of a script) for each individual task.

The old way of taming cloud sprawl was through vendor lock-in. If your company’s data and apps ended up scattered across a variety of clouds, then you were compelled to pull them all under a single umbrella, be it a private cloud or a single public cloud provider. IT gained predictability from doing this, but lost the ability to experiment outside of the chosen vendor’s bubble. Lock-in means degraded velocity and an elimination of flexibility. Lock-in means an end to innovation.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Horizontal Hybrid PaaS = Cloud Sanity

A horizontal hybrid PaaS provides a single solution to handle app deployment and management without having to give up on an agile, experimental way of doing things. With a horizontal hybrid PaaS, the enterprise gains freedom from both vendor lock-in and cloud sprawl.

CTOs, CIOs, IT directors and other technology decision makers regain governance of cloud services across the enterprise, as well as single-point-of-truth insight into where apps and services are housed. If they don’t like what they see in terms of performance or agility or any other metric, the workload portability gained from using a horizontal hybrid PaaS makes it easy to switch between clouds, turn services on and off, and switch apps from development to production and back.

Meanwhile, developers gain agility and speed above and beyond anything they’ve experienced in the enterprise. They gain the ability to use and experiment with a variety of cloud services – public, private, Rackspace, AWS, OpenStack, Azure and any language they want – in a way that doesn’t give their bosses headaches about cloud sprawl.

Business leaders are happy because IT is humming along, quickly implementing new ideas and doing more with less. All with reduced cost complexity.

Heterogeneous Clouds In The Enterprise

In 2013, heterogeneity is the name of the game in the cloud. But cloud heterogeneity is still scarier than it needs to be. But heterogeneity can be freeing and enabling, if it's properly managed.

IT should want to have it all: flexibility and control, experimentation and insight, the cost and efficiency advantages of the cloud and a no-surprises approach to cost apportionment.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

100 years from now, when the historians look back at the beginning of the 21st Century and shake their heads in amazement that we hadn't yet figured out flying cars, one thing they should give us credit for is that we finally figured out how to scale... everything. Even though the promise of the Web as a center of knowledge has been overrun with rampant commercialism, sometimes commercial interests actually align with the delivery of knowledge.

Software, databases, customer relationship management… these are all key elements of information technology that haver been pushed into the cloud to be deployed "as-a-Service" (or *aaS). This follows the model of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), and the like. Other, more rudimentary, aspects of IT have already been deployed this way, to great effect: Witness how online bookseller Amazon now dominates cloud computing by introducing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) a few years ago.

As the idea of a sharing and scaling services that were otherwise once local and isolated continues to spread, we are now seeing just about every function you can imagine being delivered as-a-service to any business who wants them.

Marketing-as-a-Service

The most recent example of this new *aaS trend is the release of the Vocus Marketing Suite, a hosted marketing service that enables small- to medium-sized businesses to access marketing tools and (more importantly) expertise for those SMBs to use.

Anyone, really, can toss together a bunch of tools to market with social media, email and press releases. A one-pane aggregate application could handle that. But using the publicly available big data that's readily available on the Internet, Vocus' new application is designed to push out very targeted information that pertains to a business' marketing goals.

Say a business wants to sell jewelry, outlined You Mon Tsang, Vocus' Senior Vice President of Products. The Marketing Suite will listen for keywords on social media channels to determine who's an influencer in the jewelry scene or maybe just which desperate significant other is out there looking to buy an anniversary gift fast.

If you're using email marketing, the tool will make sure you're not spamming potential clients, either in frequency or through the language you're using. Human editors will also step in to help craft messaging. The key to this new service making the expertise affordable to SMBs who might otherwise have to go it alone.

Big data, as mentioned, makes this all possible. In the past, marketing was sort of a gray area when it came to hard results. Using a new class of metrics, marketing's return on investment is now much more easily calculated, and results can be concretely measured.

Healthcare-as-a-Service

There are some who would argue that some things still don't scale very well. Medical information and healthcare services seem to be one of them.  Sure, you can go on to WebMD and find out how to treat the cold that seems to be coming on… but without medical expertise at your disposal, you may decide that you really have the bubonic plague. And while "the plague is upon us" has a nice historical ring, it also tends to be a bit alarmist.

Healthcare professionals don't scale terribly well online, if only because the medical arts depend, usually, on face-to-face contact between the patient and the caregiver.

This is not to say that some aspects of healthcare can't be found in *aaS. A new startup in Indiana called hc1.com, for instance, has created a very niche cloud approach to resource management for medical labs, so they can work with multiple providers and deliver analyses more efficiently.

As medical providers continue to work with government and market requirements to use electronic health records, vendors like ClearDATA are working the edges, delivering secure messaging and cloud computing services.

So healthcare and medical-sector services are finding their way into the cloud, though still more on the edges instead of a full-on approach. But after a few more years of medical-monitoring innovation, who's to say you won't someday get a text message that says "Stop eating that pastrami, your arteries are about to pop!"

Anything-as-a-Service?

The world around us, thanks to connectivity and much faster computing platforms, seems destined to push all manner of services on to the Internet, where they can be acquired on demand, without having to build your own infrastructure to support them. Distance learning, shopping, news gathering and many more are already there. Others are coming, and there's no telling how far the trend will go.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

While cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft scramble to cut prices to lure customers to their cloud-computing infrastructures, their smaller rival Rackspace Hosting is heading in the opposite direction.

"We're not going the route of a race to the bottom," says John Engates, Rackspace's chief technology officer. Instead, Rackspace is betting that corporate customers will pay more to make the San Antonio-based company their IT department in the cloud - a strategy that's sure to face challenges as the number of competitors rises.

Rackspace's Success

Over the last several years, Rackspace has competed mostly with Amazon in the business of renting data center servers for pennies an hour to run websites and business applications. Since its initial public offering in 2008, Rackspace has grown its cloud infrastructure business to nearly 24% of revenue. The company has more than 180,000 business customers and topped $1 billion in revenue last year for the first time.

But the competitive landscape is growing more crowded. Besides Google and Microsoft, heavyweights Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have also checked in for battle. Rackspace is banking that analysts are right when they say price alone isn't going to win business. Besides pitching better services at a higher price, Rackspace is touting OpenStack, an open source, cloud-computing platform it launched with NASA in 2010. Roughly 150 companies have joined the initiative, including Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco and AT&T. In fact, on Tuesday, HP released HP Cloud Compute, making it the first non-Rackspace vendor to build an offering with OpenStack (see HP Switches On Public Cloud, Thanks To OpenStack).

Rackspace and OpenStack supporters are hoping businesses will buy into their claims that the platform provides more flexibility than the various proprietary systems offered by Amazon and others. Theoretically, whatever you are running on one OpenStack implementation can be moved to any other OpenStack implementation, making it easier for customers to switch vendors.

Fighting Vendor Lock-In

"The challenge with proprietary (cloud technology) is that customers feel like they're going down a path that's sort of a one way street," Engates tells ReadWrite. "They're locking themselves in and there's no way out. If they choose to go somewhere else, they have to re-architect, rebuild or retool, and that's a challenge."

Over the last several weeks, Rackspace has rolled out the complete suite of OpenStack-based products, including servers, databases, infrastructure monitoring, backup, storage and networking. "We're in full production with all these services," Engates says.

Is OpenStack Immature?

OpenStack has its critics. Research firm Gartner says Rackspace and other supporters are not really interested in building an open cloud platform. Rather, they have pooled resources in order to battle Amazon's dominance in providing cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). They also do not want to pay license fees for commercial cloud technology, such as VMware's vCloud stack.

Rather than being ready for prime time, OpenStack is an "early-stage project whose future, though promising, is still uncertain," Gartner says.

"Some people have been led to believe that because OpenStack is open source, it is an open and widely adopted standard, with broad interoperability and freedom from commercial interests," Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote in a recent analysis. "In reality, OpenStack is dominated by commercial interests, as it is a business strategy for the vendors involved, not the effort of a community of altruistic individual contributors."

Big Data

Nevertheless, Rackspace is plowing ahead with plans to use OpenStack early next year in helping companies manage the huge amount of data created each day. Rackspace has partnered with Hortonworks, which is using the Apache Hadoop data platform to power products for storing, managing, processing and analyzing large amounts of data. "Big data is an area that we think is still in the early days, but there's a lot of interest and a lot of excitement around it," Engates says.

Amazon also sees money in big data. Last week, the company introduced its first big data product at the first Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent customer conference. Amazon is calling big data platform Redshift Data Warehouse as a Service, and business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft has announced support for the technology.

Like Amazon, Rackspace is taking its cloud services outside the U.S. Roughly a quarter of its revenue comes from overseas, mostly from Europe. It has data centers in London and Hong Kong and plans to open one in Australia "very soon," says Engates, who didn't know the exact date. The company is also considering a data center in Latin America.

With expansion overseas, a major platform redesign and new products on the way, Rackspace will need higher prices to fund its ambitions. The question is whether potential customers will still find them a good deal in a highly competitive market

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.