Selection by use case of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS – Leveraging the Cloud for Digital Transformation
Selection by use case of SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS
Each model you learned, including the on-premises model, has advantages and disadvantages. The one you should choose depends on your specific business requirements, what features are needed, and the developers and testers that comprise your team. You might need a fully out-of-the-box solution, and time to market might be a more important consideration than price. Or perhaps you have regulatory constraints that force you to have complete control of the environment. AWS offers a lot of assurances regarding their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and compliance certifications. The more levels in the stack you decide to manage, the more effort you will exert to verify that your systems comply with the different regulations.In general, one good rule of thumb is to let AWS take over the management of your resources whenever possible. You only take over the responsibility whenever necessary. For example, could you imagine trying to implement the functionality that Amazon Elastic Load Balancing or the Elastic Kubernetes Service provides? Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of the classification covered in the previous sections, you will learn about some of the fundamental services that underpin these models.There are two main reasons why not to use SaaS and instead use IaaS or PaaS:
- The use case requires a certain type of database or software not supported by the AWS SaaS solutions. For example, you may already have purchased Tableau licenses for your organization and built reports. So instead of using Amazon QuickSight as a SaaS BI platform, you can install Tableau in EC2 instances as an IaaS model.
- The total cost of ownership of running an application using PaaS or IaaS is significantly lower than the SaaS model. A specific example may be AWS Athena versus using Presto directly. If you plan to run thousands of queries per day, with the current cost structure, some cloud users have found deploying Presto more cost-effective than using AWS Athena. Another option is to use Amazon Redshift as a PaaS model rather than Athena as a SaaS model cost-efficiently. It’s important to note that these cost calculations should be carried out using all relevant costs, including staffing and support costs, not just software costs.
As you learned about different cloud computing models with understanding to make the right choices, now let’s learn about cloud migration strategy.
