Cloud Service Types

Cloud services from Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and others can be divided into several categories, each with distinct benefits and limitations and differences to traditional on-premises data centers:

Infrastructure services resemble an on-premises data center and primarily consist of virtual machines, networking, and storage. The provider purchases and manages the underlying hardware, but customers must continue to manage the operating system, storage, and applications. This approach, known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), reduces upfront capital costs, lends itself to an easier migration, and reduces the overhead of managing a data center, but it does not significantly reduce the cost of managing servers and applications.

Platform services are a level above infrastructure services and consist of preconfigured environments that customers can use without managing the operating systems, storage, and hardware. Known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), they have lower management costs, but migration from existing on-premises systems is often more difficult. It usually requires modifying applications and may incur more cost than infrastructure equivalents. Additionally, platform services are updated at a pace dictated by the cloud provider, which is faster than the usual pace of on-premises updates. The faster update cadence results in more frequent changes and testing, especially when the Azure services are connected to multiple applications.