"Terrace got us from design to a working application in record time, which has been instrumental in moving our product development forward. Their team is highly skilled, collaborative and quite willing to work pragmatically to adjust to our process. With regards to Azure, they were able to identify and solve the tricky issues up front, thus avoiding much of the pain typical of working on the leading edge of technology.

Steve Harshbarger
Chief Technology Officer, PRIMARQ

Cloud Architectures

There are three distinct architectures available for businesses to leverage Cloud Services. We can help you understand each of these architectures and make the appropriate deployment decision for each cloud application.

Over time, you might use all of these architectures as part of your overall Cloud strategy.

Infrastructure as a Service

or IaaS is the most basic cloud offering. Co-location of servers to a third party company is the best example of IaaS. In this model, the "co-lo" provides a complete data center facility operated remotely for the customer. Customers share these facilities and essentially rent space on the co-lo's racks for their hardware.

The co-lo provides connectivity to these servers and the internet. The customer is responsible for just about everything else including:

  1. Hardware
  2. Operating system software
  3. Networking
  4. Applications

All the systems administration typically required in any on-premise data center. Some examples of IaaS include Amazon EC2 and RackSpace.

Software as a Service

or SaaS is a rich model of cloud computing designed to deliver packaged software. SaaS providers offer 'utility computing' specific to one or more proprietary software applications. The SaaS customer buys the SaaS service for an incremental fee (e.g., monthly) based on usage and storage.

This is an attractive service for customers because it offers all the advantages of a proven software package without any need for hardware, operating system software, storage, networking and application software.

The SaaS provider maintains, patches and upgrades all pieces of the SaaS solution transparently as part of the negotiated fees. Some examples of SaaS include Salesforce.com, QuickBooks Online, Workday.com, and USA.NET exchange e-mail.

Platform as a Service

or PaaS is a rich model of cloud computing designed to deliver custom business application software. PaaS providers offer a completely integrated 'utility computing' platform. This includes:

  1. Hardware
  2. Operating system software
  3. Data storage software
  4. On demand load balancing
  5. Networking
  6. Ubiquitous high speed internet connectivity
  7. Integrated, transparent on demand scalability.

PaaS is an attractive offering for businesses that operate custom business software. The fees for PaaS offerings include many costs which are now assumed by customers in the on-premise model.

This includes hardware purchasing and deployment, operating system and application software licensing, initial machine builds and subsequent upgrades and patching, 24x7 uptime monitoring, and performance scaling. Some examples of PaaS include Microsoft Azure, Force.com and Google Apps.

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