What are cloud services?

Published March 14, 2022•3-minute read
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OverviewWhat are examples of cloud services?How does it work?Cloud infrastructureCloud platformsCloud softwareWhy Red Hat?

What are examples of cloud services?

Allinfrastructure, platforms, software, or technologies that users access through the internet without requiring additional software downloads can be consideredcloud computing services—including the following as-a-Service solutions.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides users with compute, networking, and storage resources.

Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides users with a platform on which applications can run, as well as all the IT infrastructure required for it to run.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provides users with—essentially—acloud application, the platform on which it runs, and the platform’s underlying infrastructure.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), anevent-driven execution model, lets developers build, run, andmanage app packages as functions without maintaining the infrastructure.

Clouds are IT environments that abstract, pool, and share scalable resources across a network. Clouds enable cloud computing, which is the act of running workloads within a cloud environment. Clouds are a type of PaaS, because hardware and an application software platform is provided by another party.

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How do cloud services work?

Like all other IT solutions, cloud services rely on hardware and software. However, unlike traditional hardware and software solutions, users don’t need anything other than a computer, network connection, andoperating system to access cloud services.

Cloud infrastructure

When supplying users with acloud infrastructure, cloud services providers detach computing capabilities from hardware components, such as separating:

  • Processing power from central processing units (CPUs)
  • Active memory from random access memory (RAM) chips
  • Graphics processing from the graphics processing units (GPUs)
  • Data storage availability from datacenters or hard drives

This abstraction is typically accomplished throughvirtualization andvirtual machines. Once separated, the storage, compute, and networking components are provided to users through the internet as infrastructure—or IaaS. This kind of cloud service has led to the rise ofcloud storage, which storesbig data as part of theInternet of Things (IOT).RackSpace is an example of an IaaS provider.

Cloud platforms

Cloud service providers can also use their hardware resources to create cloud platforms, which are online environments where users can develop code or run apps. Building a cloud platform requires more than just abstracting a computer’s capabilities from its hardware components—like when providing cloud infrastructure. Providing a cloud platform requires additional levels of development to incorporate technologies likecontainerization, orchestration,application programming interfaces (APIs), routing, security, management, andautomation. User experience design (UX) is also an important consideration in order to create a navigable online experience.

Cloud platforms are a type of PaaS. And if the infrastructural components holding up the PaaS are highly scalable and sharable, it might be considered a cloud. The best examples of PaaS clouds include public clouds and managed private clouds.

Public cloud providers

Public cloud providers abstract their own infrastructure, platforms, or apps from hardware they own; pool them intodata lakes; and share them with many tenants. They can also offer public cloud services, likeAPI management, cloud-based operating systems, or libraries of development templates known as frameworks. Some popular public clouds include Alibaba Cloud,Microsoft Azure,Google Cloud,Amazon Web Services (AWS), andIBM Cloud.

Managed private clouds

Also known as managed cloud providers, private cloud providers serve customers a private cloud that's deployed, configured, and managed by someone other than the customer. It's a cloud delivery option that helps enterprises or small businesses with understaffed or underskilled IT teams provide better private cloud services and infrastructure to users.

Cloud software

The final widely accepted cloud service that providers can offer is a full web application—known as cloud software or SaaS. This requires the highest development investment because the cloud provider is literally offering an online app to customers.

Cloud software can be provided using acloud-native approach, which is anapplication architecture combining small, independent, and loosely coupledmicroservices. Multiple microservices can be packaged into individualLinux® containers managed by acontainer orchestration engine likeKubernetes orRed Hat® OpenShift®. The final product is a cloud app that can be optimized by the microservice without impacting other microservices that—together—make up the whole app.

Why choose Red Hat for cloud services?

Red Hat cloud services include hosted and managed platform, application, and data services that accelerate time to value and reduce the operational cost and complexity of delivering cloud-native applications. The core of Red Hat cloud services areRed Hat OpenShift's cloud services editions, available as turnkey application platforms from major cloud providers. Organizations can confidently build and scale applications with a streamlined experience across services and hybrid cloud environments while Red Hat manages the rest.

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What is PaaS?

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a form of cloud computing where the hardware and software platform is provided by a third party.

What is IaaS?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing in which infrastructure services are provided to the user through a cloud.

IaaS vs. PaaS vs. SaaS

“As-a-service” generally means a cloud computing service that is provided by a third party.

Cloud services resources

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