A small business is evaluating cloud services for its new customer support portal. They have limited IT staff and want to minimize the effort required for patching, updating, and maintaining the underlying operating system and software stack. They primarily need a platform to deploy their custom web application without worrying about infrastructure management. Which cloud service model is most appropriate?
- ASoftware as a Service (SaaS)
- BPlatform as a Service (PaaS)
- CInfrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- DFunction as a Service (FaaS)
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, including operating systems, web servers, databases, and programming language execution environments. The cloud provider manages the underlying infrastructure, OS, and runtime, allowing the customer to focus solely on deploying and managing their applications. This perfectly matches the small business's need to avoid infrastructure management while deploying a custom web application.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. SaaS offers fully managed applications, not a platform for deploying custom applications.
- C. IaaS requires the customer to manage the operating system and software stack, which conflicts with the goal of minimizing maintenance effort.
- D. FaaS is primarily for event-driven, stateless functions, which might be part of the solution but doesn't encompass the 'platform to deploy their custom web application' as broadly as PaaS.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
A cloud computing service model that provides a complete development and deployment environment for applications, including operating systems, programming language execution environments, databases, and web servers.
- Provider manages OS, runtime, middleware, infrastructure
- Customer manages applications and data
- Ideal for developers to build and deploy applications quickly
Memory trick: PaaS is your ready-to-code platform.