What is Microsoft Azure? IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

Nitish Kumar
2 min readMay 23, 2021

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Microsoft Azure

As you begin to consider switching your business to the cloud, whether it be for application or infrastructure deployment, it is more important than ever to understand the differences and advantages of the various cloud services.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure is a service that provides cloud computing for building, managing, deploying and testing applications and services. It supports various programming languages. As you expect, it supports Microsoft-specific software, but also different third-party software. It provides three options — infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

IaaS is a kind cloud computing where a company provides a part of the computer’s resources through virtualization. The user can rent a part of the computer (server) and use it as own. The machine won’t show the complete resources it has, but it will show only the shared with this user resources. Different users can use the same server separately.
The advantage is that users can use a high-end server without purchasing it. Also, it is very easy to upgrade if the user needs more resources.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

PaaS is an environment in which developers can create different applications. It supports many program languages, and it provides the hardware so users can develop and test applications.
The advantage is that it is a complete environment, which lets developers jump into the action by giving them all that they need, including testing tools. It is secure too.

Software as a service (SaaS)

You are probably familiar with this one. There are plenty of well-known applications that you are using daily like Dropbox, OneDrive and more that deliver services over the internet. Users can access them through an application or the web browsers, thanks to APIs.
Advantage, the multi-platform approach where users can access their data on different devices.

Conclusion:

Microsoft Azure provides a huge versatility. You can use it in many different ways. It is relatively easy to set up (depending on the complexity of the task you need), and it is easy to scale. Azure doesn’t require a purchase of hardware, but it uses a subscription model that might be expensive for some.

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