Ten-Minute Series: Understanding the Cloud – What is “As a Service?”

Hi, welcome back to the 10 Minute Series. Today we’re gonna talk about understanding the cloud and understanding what is as a service, because you hear software as a service, platform as a service, all these different types of services. We’re gonna talk about what that means and hopefully make it make sense. This video is of course brought to you by me, Kelly Handerhan, and I’m the owner and founder of cybertrain.it and we teach a wide variety of courses throughout the globe, everything from the ISC Squared courses, CompTIA, project management professional, and I am a Microsoft certified trainer and have been so for a large number of years so if I can help you in any way in your studies please feel free to send me an email at kellyh@cybertrain.it.

All right so let’s talk about what this idea of as a service means, because we hear it a lot and as the cloud continues it’s dominance and take over of the world you’re gonna continue to hear as a service. Let’s talk about the way it used to be versus what we’re seeing now. All right and we’re gonna think about this in terms of pizza, pizza as a service. My organization we make pizzas, all right I have my own kitchen, I buy my own supplies, I hire my own workers to make the pizza, every time there’s a problem with the oven or with the facility or all anything that comes up is all my responsibility. I’ve just had three ovens go out in the last month and I’ve had to pay for new ones, it’s expensive, it’s cumbersome, and honestly I’m just tired of dealing with it. I’m gonna look at some other options, I want pizza that’s not in question, but it’s how much time, effort, and responsibility do I want to take on myself.

All right so one of the things … so I’m looking at some options and I come across an option that says, “Infrastructure as a service for making pizza,” and I say, “Well that sounds interesting, what would that even mean?” I call up the facility and they say, “Look, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna give you a place to make your pizza, we’re gonna give you a facility, we’re gonna give you ovens, we’re gonna give you a refrigerator, we’ll provide gas to the building, you bring everything else in, you set up shop, you make your own pizzas.” Now I still have to buy the dough and the ingredients, I still have to cook the pizza, I still have to do all those pieces but I’m no longer responsible for the charge of the facility, the power bills, heating and cooling, I’m not responsible if the over explodes.

Now I am responsible if I leave the gas on all night and there’s a fire or I am responsible for cooking the pizza well. Right? That means I gotta set the oven on the proper temperature, if I’m trying to cook a pizza at 900 degrees for half an hour that’s my problem. Right? But as far as the day to day maintenance, the upkeep all I gotta do is come in and build my pizza and that’s a beautiful thing for me, that’s a lot less responsibility. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m paying a hefty fee monthly for that, but it’s not that upfront fee that you do when you’re going into business when you talk about capital expense versus operational expense.

Capital expense is that big, upfront, gotta invest in a lot of equipment you’re not gonna see the immediate return on. Operating expenses are a little bit more palatable because you know usually often we pay them periodically and they’re a lot smaller. Infrastructure as a service looks pretty good and as a matter of fact when I’m thinking about it as well you know what I don’t even have to sell pizza, I’ve got a whole kitchen if I decide I want to make sandwiches or if I want to deliver maybe make Chinese food or whatever I’ve got the kitchen, I’ll do whatever I want with it. There are very few restrictions I’m just kind of leasing out the kitchen.

That’s still a lot of responsibility on me, I know that I just want to make pizza, I know that I want … I just want a little bit less management. All I really want to do is show up and kind of put the pizza together. Okay? I want to keep looking so I find somebody that’s offering platform as a service for pizza, pizza manufacturing if you will. I call them and I say, “Well what do I get with you guys?” And they say, “Look you get this entire set up that is designed for pizza. We’re gonna give you a place to put all of your toppings, we’re gonna give you the dough, we’re gonna give you the little grate that it cooks on, we’re gonna give you all the equipment to make your pizza. You show up, you bring your toppings, and you can put any toppings you want. Right? You can sell pizza with pepperoni or you can sell pizza with clams,” and I don’t know where that came from, don’t put clams on pizza, that’s just wrong, I’m sorry New England folks it’s just wrong to put clams on pizza. That’s another class.

“But you can bring in whatever toppings, you want cherry peppers, you want broccoli on pizza,” which is also wrong, “You can do whatever you want but it does have to be pizza because we’re just gonna give you the pizza dough, here’s what you can do but you have this whole environment and you can be as creative as you want with all the toppings.” Now that sounds pretty good but you know what? I’m tired, I’m tired really of making pizza, I’m tired of investing in the toppings, sometimes you buy 50 pounds of pepperoni and you only use 20 pounds and 30 pounds of pepperoni goes bead, I’m tired. You know what? Let me just call and find software as a service for pizza.

You know what you do as software as a service for pizza? You just call and order pizza whenever you want it. That actually sounds really good because I have no responsibility. I just dial up the pizza delivery guy and say, “I want a large pepperoni with olives and onions,” and he says, “Okay, here’s your larger pepperoni with olives and onions.” Now I don’t get to customize that a lot. Right? They give me a menu and I only have to work within that menu so now I can’t say, “Put clams on my pizza because I’m feeling crazy,” they’ll say, “We don’t have clams, you’re not getting clams on your pizza and we don’t have clams. Here’s what you got pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, onions, and green peppers, choose with those.” I’m very limited in my flexibility but I just show up and use the product and I go home, I’m done.

Basically when I’m choosing these ideas as a service if we look at this from an IT perspective traditionally we’ve owned everything. Right? I’ve owned the servers, I’ve owned the software, I’ve owned the routers and the switches and the network components, I’ve owned the software, I’ve had to install the software and patch the software and all of these things. Now I received a call that can make my life easier so I looked into infrastructure as a service, when I deal with infrastructure as a service you know Amazon web services would provide any of these, certainly IAAS and platform as a service and it’s able to solve well.

An example software as a service would be like web mail and Microsoft Office 365, I’ll get there in a second, but let’s say that I’m interested in infrastructure as a service. All right well I don’t want to have to have the facility to host 50 servers, I might need 50 servers today and one tomorrow, that’s too expensive, that’s a lot of money that I’m not gonna get to utilize fully, a lot of resources. I’m gonna pay heating and cooling on my facility with 50 servers and all that network equipment and would be responsible if a switch goes bad, I just want to use a network but I don’t want to be responsible for it.

With infrastructure as a service basically what I’m doing is I am leasing virtual machines, I’m gonna get a virtual hard drive, and I can install whatever I want in that hard drive, I have to make sure what I install has the appropriate security, I have to manage the configuration of the virtual hard drive, I manage communication between my systems in that virtualized environment, but I’m not paying for the machines, I don’t have ownership of the machines, all of those elements. I install the operating system, any sort of middleware, that data in the applications, but everything else is taking care of by the provider they give me the virtualized systems, they have the servers and the storage facilities and the networking capabilities. I have a lot of flexibility in this environment but I also have a lot of responsibility as well.

Then we move to platform as a service, well with platform as a service I may have software developers and we need proprietary software. I need somewhere to run the proprietary software, I need a database for that back end to store the proprietary software, I need the systems. What we want to do is we want to develop applications, platform as a service is for us. Now I can develop software and I can use the testing tools and all of the libraries and various tools that are necessary to build software, but I can only build software, that’s what we’re doing on platform as a service. Right?

Or I can just take advantage of software that’s already out there, Office 356. Why bother with design and implement a spreadsheet when I can use Office 365’s Excel for instance. You know I’ve got Gmail or Salesforce or any of those other applications. I just essentially create my users and handle their identity, I make sure that my data is stored in a secure location but that’s pretty much it for me. Really I’m storing my data in the cloud as well, I kind of misspoke there because I’m storing my data in the cloud, they’re making sure that the data itself is protected. Now of course I have responsibilities for the data as well too, you know in process and all those pieces.

Ultimately what am I trading each step of the way? I’m trading in flexibility for outsourcing, for ease of use, let somebody else deal with it. Often you’ll see all three of these incorporated in an organization. You know a platform exists or our software was created by platform as a service which exists on infrastructure as a service. It’s not necessarily one or the other but the bottom line, what drives me to choose one or the other or all of them is how much control, how much flexibility do I need and do I want, how much am I willing to turn over to my cloud service provider?

You’re gonna continue to hear this idea of as a service, you’ll hear disaster recovery as a service, identity management as a service, those are discussions for other days. I hope this analogy of understanding it in the world of pizza, because everybody understands pizza, I hope that this was helpful for you and I hope that you continue to enjoy our 10 Minute Series.