This is the first post of many in my series, "Head in the Cloud," where I will document my struggles and successes as I venture into the great unknown. Currently, I do not know very much about cloud computing, but, I do know some big players in the game are: Amazon with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft with Azure, and Google with Google Cloud. For this series I will be focusing on Amazon Web Services but may use the others as examples.

The end goal of this series is to get the AWS Cloud Practitioner and AWS Solutions Architect certificate and to help others who are on the same journey. I will update this post with resources I will personally use to help myself prepare.

I'd like to set the foundation of this series by going over the 3 pillars or categories of cloud computing:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is the most basic form of cloud computing. In this form, the customer rents virtualized computing, storage, and networking resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. This means you do not have to have your own servers to host your application or store your own data locally. By using Infrastructure as a Service, not only could you save money on hardware costs and maintenance, but, you can also scale up and down as needed with your provider.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service is the next step up from Infrastructure as a Service. It builds on top of the virtualized resources from Infrastructure as a Service without having to worry about managing those resources. Platform as a Service provides you with a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. Platform as a Service allows developers to build, test, debug, deploy, host, and update their applications all in the same environment. It also allows developers to not have to build a backend infrastructure and do system administration work.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service is a cloud-based method of providing software to users. This allows users to not have to install anything on their home machines, but rather access it via the internet. A few common examples of this would be Gmail, Office 365 and even YouTube!

While researching this topic I found this analogy on the IBM Technology YouTube channel to be useful.

Infrastructure as a Service is like leasing a car. You care about the performance, colour, and what kind of car it is. You pay the monthly payments, you are the one driving, and you pay for gas, tolls and maintenance. Platform as a Service is like renting a car. You do not care about colour or specs and do not have to worry about the cost of maintenance, but, you still pay the rental fee, gas and tolls. Software as a Service is like a taxi. All the costs of maintaining the vehicle and driving are accounted for in a service fee that you, as the customer, pay.

I hope this helps set the baseline for our understanding of cloud computing. I'm looking forward to more. Don't forget to check back for updates!