Fundamentals of Cloud Computing: Software-as-a-Service
Rapid elasticity, measured service, multi-tenant applications…if these features make visions of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) dance in your head, then you are in the right place. And if it just brings confusion, have no fear-you too are in the right place!
During the second installment of the Fundamentals of Cloud Computing webcast series, the DLT Cloud Advisory Group talked “SaaS” and lots of it. Beginning with an overview of the basics, CTO Van Ristau delves into a complete evaluation of different solutions available with this deployment model. But what really is the difference between SaaS and PaaS and IaaS you ask? Watch this exclusive video of Van explaining just that.
If you think about it from a consumer landscape, SaaS has been out there for very long time, on the Internet. Think about things like image or picture sharing, and even music streaming or music purchasing. All of these are affectively SaaS offerings for the consumer space. But knowing how to use these “as-a-service” layers together is where things become complicated.
One webcast viewer asked, “How do you integrate SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS? Where do the savings come from without losing the security?”
Chief cloud technologist David Blankenhorn shed some light on the matter. “Fortunately, there are a number of developments that show a silver lining for cloud to cloud integration. The first development is the improvements in the APIs that cloud providers are exposing. The second is the creation of “translator” types of products and services that translate calls from one cloud provider’s API to another cloud provider’s API (think Red Hat’s Deltacloud and CloudForms). Finally, we are seeing SaaS providers who are designed specifically for transferring and synchronizing data between clouds (like Informatica Cloud).
To see David’s complete answer and the full list of questions from the series, visit the cloud Q&A page.
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