What exactly is the essence of cloud-based services like Microsoft Azure? We explain in our article and also offer a course!
When computers started to move skyward, people were increasingly using terms like cloud, AWS, Azure, infrastructure, and platform as a service, and many people, even among the professionals, felt lost. Why? Because explaining what the cloud is is like trying to summarize the message of War and Peace into a brick. An analogy was needed to make it all more understandable and tangible. Thus was born the pizza as a service analogy, and Paul Kerrison developed it further and created the expanded version a few years ago , which we present now.
Let's run through the 4 most important columns of the figure and look at some examples of each part:
Ground IT: The traditional IT approach is the home pizza-making model, where you buy the ingredients, provide the gas and electricity, and do practically everything yourself. This is how a company operates, putting a computer in the corner and designating it “The Server,” which does everything, stores everything, and brings the company down when it goes down.
Infrastructure as a service: The second model is the community kitchen. We still have to provide the ingredients and do the baking ourselves, but the electricity, gas, iron and oven are given, and we do not have to ensure that they are provided, but the kitchen operator. This solution is used by the company that, with noble simplicity, puts the “Server” mentioned in the previous example one-on-one in the cloud. The cloud provides the electricity and hardware from here on, but everything else is still in the hands of the company.
Platform as a service: The model shown in the fourth column is food delivery, where the service provider provides everything to make the pizza, but the ideal conditions for eating the pizza, friends, party, Fa… or Bambi, the pizza, must be provided by the person ordering it. Returning to our company analogy: this is the service level when the company no longer wants to solve everything with “The Server” because its resources are finite, and although the virtual hardware can scale under it, it is not nearly as efficient as if the company were to use platform services designed for this purpose.
Software as a Service: The model discussed in the last column is the Pizza party service, which provides the pizza, the party, invites people, and in return, all you have to do is use the service. You don't have to monitor, plan, or scale anything, the service provider takes care of everything. At this point, our ominous company can forget about "The Server" because it can use all of its functions, services, and software through the cloud provider. This is the point when, for example, a virtual machine running an exchange server becomes completely unnecessary because the company switches to Office 365, i.e. cloud-based email.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of cloud services, visit one of our Azure foundation training courses !