Cloud & 'as-a-Service' Delivery

Computing over the internet

Renting computing power, storage and software online from providers instead of buying and running your own servers.

Software as a Service

Ready-to-use software you log into online and pay for by subscription, such as Microsoft 365 or Salesforce.

Platform as a Service

A hosted environment for building and running your own apps without managing the servers underneath. Examples: Vercel, Google Cloud Run, Azure App Service.

Infrastructure as a Service

Renting the raw building blocks of computing, such as servers, storage and networking. Example: Amazon EC2.

Anything as a Service

The umbrella term for delivering almost any IT capability over the internet on a subscription.

The big three cloud providers

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, the three largest cloud platforms.

Virtual Machine

A software-based computer running inside a physical one, so a single machine can safely do the work of many.

Cloud geography / isolated location

A region is a separate geographic cloud area; availability zones are independent locations within it used to reduce the impact of a single-site failure.

Traffic distribution service

A service that receives incoming traffic and distributes it across healthy servers or containers to improve capacity and availability.

Automatic capacity scaling

Automatically adds or removes computing capacity as demand changes, helping performance during peaks and reducing waste when demand falls.

Shared SaaS architecture

An architecture where multiple customers, or tenants, share at least some application components while their users and data remain appropriately isolated.

Provider-operated technology service

A service where the provider operates routine infrastructure tasks such as patching, scaling, backups or availability for the customer.