As a service (AAS) is a business model in which something is being presented to a customer, either internal or external, as a service.[1] As-a-Service offerings provide endpoints for customers/consumers to interface with which are usually API driven, but can commonly be controlled via a web console in a user's web browser. The term XaaS can mean "anything as a service".[lower-alpha 1]

Internally these often complex systems generally possess a high degree of internal automation which generally provide varying levels of fault tolerance and resiliency, the ability to scale up/down in or out to meet capacity and performance requirements of the workloads submitted to the service by its users/consumers, and are usually intended to operate their day to day functions without the need for human intervention. IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) features most commonly included in this automation package are compute, storage, network, telemetry, and logging/accountability features, but most IaaS components owe some portion of their workload to these services. Other prominent forms of this model include Platform as a service and Software as a service. The current cloud computing ecosystem contains multiple cloud providers, each with their own menu of these services for their customers to consume on-demand or in some cases even with pre-scoped capacity agreements.

AAS services have the following features:

  1. They are based on open source projects with little to no licensing costs
  2. Require little to no human intervention to perform their tasks/roles
  3. Could be scaled up or down depending on level / volume needed
  4. Maintained and supported internally by the cloud provider
  5. Use resources that are expendable for reuse by other IaaS tasks and services

Using AAS services can offer a large cost savings over traditional vendor-provided infrastructure and server based equivalencies. When deciding on XaaS, one has to consider vendor-specific lock-in features which can be more limited than other similar open source projects.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ sometimes called EaaS or "Everything as a Service"[2]

References

Look up -aaS in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
  1. ↑ Robin Hastings, Making the Most of the Cloud: How to Choose and Implement the Best Services (2013), p. 3.
  2. ↑ Duan, Yucong; Fu, Guohua; Zhou, Nianjun (2015). Everything as a Service(XaaS) on the Cloud: Origins, Current and Future Trends. IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing. IEEE Computer Society. pp. 621–628. doi:10.1109/CLOUD.2015.88.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.