Another important distinction is to be made with respect to the amount of work done by the user or by the cloud platform provider. Let us take a look at this distinction with the help of the following service levels:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): At the minimum level, IaaS, the cloud provider, handles the machines, their virtualization and the required networking. The user is responsible for everything else—OS, middleware, data, and application software. The provider is the host of the resources on which the user builds the infrastructure. Google compute Engine, SQL, DNS, or load balancing are examples of IaaS services within the GCP.
- Platform as a service (PaaS): In a PaaS offering, the user is only responsible ...