IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS vs Serverless — The Cloud Spectrum Explained

Think about ordering food. You could buy raw ingredients and cook everything from scratch. You could get a meal kit with pre-measured ingredients. You could order takeout. Or you could walk into a restaurant and just eat.

Each option gives you less control but more convenience. Cloud computing works exactly the same way. The "cloud" is not one thing — it is a spectrum of services that trade control for convenience at different points. Understanding where you are on that spectrum is the difference between deploying your app in an afternoon and spending a month fighting server configurations.

The Four Layers

The cloud computing world organizes into four major service models. Each one abstracts away a different layer of the technology stack, so you can focus on what matters to your pro