[cloud] What is SaaS, PaaS and IaaS? With examples

Iam sharing my experiences along with Standard definitions by NIST. Iam developer from product company and we own database and client (eco system). Beside many clear pictures the confusion arises because of many actors(5 defined by NIST) and things differ from prespectives.

For IaaS and Bare metal deployments we sell licenses and packages can be obtained from CD's or FTP server (rpms). The code is compiled tested and delivered. Here our customers pay to us (license cost) and/or to cloud provider for instances.

We partner with cloud providers (technology partner) to sell our products via marketplace.

Typically we deliver images (ami,vhd,etc) + some (cloud formation templates or ARM templates, etc) in case of PaaS. We have Jenkins pipelines to place them in market place (version based). Here with some skills developers can login into instances and manipulate the software (e.g after database instances are launched login and completely remove the software and make it look like just EC2 instances)

In case of SaaS our Jenkins pipelines will directly deploy (whether they are web apps, azure/lambda functions). Neither developers/end users have less control over the physical hardware.

Below are the Actors defined by NIST and since developers(tech company that provides software) partners with cloud provider, developers best match is cloud provider.

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