The move to virtualized data centers introduced
customers to two new types of offerings:
infrastructure as a service, commonly referred to as IaaS,
and platform as a service, or PaaS. IaaS delivers on-demand infrastructure resources
via the cloud, such as: raw compute,
storage, and network capabilities, organized virtually
into resources that are similar to physical data centers. Compute Engine is an example of a Google Cloud
IaaS service. PaaS offerings, in contrast, bind code to libraries that provide access
to the infrastructure application needs. This allows more resources to be focused on
application logic. App Engine is an example of a Google Cloud
PaaS service. In the IaaS model, customers pay for the resources
they allocate ahead of time; in the PaaS model, customers pay for the resources
they actually use. As cloud computing has evolved, the momentum
has shifted toward managed infrastructure and managed services. Leveraging managed resources and services
allows companies to concentrate more on their business goals and spend less time
and money on creating and maintaining their technical infrastructure. It allows companies to deliver products and
services to their customers more quickly
and reliably. Serverless is yet another step in the evolution
of cloud computing. It allows developers to concentrate on their
code, rather than on server configuration, by eliminating the need for any infrastructure
management. Serverless technologies offered by Google
include Cloud Functions, which manages event-driven code as a pay-as-you-go service, and
Cloud Run, which allows customers to deploy their containerized microservices based application
in a fully-managed environment. While it’s outside the scope of this course,
you might have heard about software as a service, SaaS, and wondered what it is and how it fits
into the Cloud ecosphere. SaaS provides the entire application stack,
delivering an entire cloud-based application that customers can access and use. Software as a Service applications are not
installed on your local computer. Instead, they run in the cloud as a service
and are consumed directly over the internet by end users Popular Google applications such as Gmail,
Docs, and Drive, that are a part of Google Workspace, are all examples of SaaS.