(Not so) Stupid Question 288: What is RaaS?
Just came back home from a JavaScript user group, third one in two weeks. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to meet new and old friends. Talking about old friends, my former colleague James was there. He was my first colleague as a programmer, and it was a great way to start my professional life as a programmer.
Anyway. Let’s get to the point.
There is PaaS (Platform as a Service), Saas (Software as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), but I hadn’t heard of RaaS until today when I came across an article from 2014 with the title ‘The rise of RaaS’ as I was reading through some older issues of Communications of the ACM.
In the article RaaS is short for Resource as a Service, but the term can also be used for Recovery as a Service. Recovery as a service can also be referred to as Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) which I find more descriptive. The latter, DRaaS is -in simplified terms- cloud backup that allows for full (and speedy) recovery and is often integrated or offered as an add-on for other cloud service families such as IaaS.
RaaS is also a part of IaaS. IaaS provides bundles with a set amount of resources, or resources with a set scale which affects horizontal as well as vertical scale. While cloud providers such as Azure provide different price tiers and resource models in their IaaS services some argue that the price tiers and bundles aren’t quite RaaS. True RaaS would, as some define it, provide individually priced resources (I/O bandwidth, core count, memory size..) with prices that are more market driven.
And that’s how I understand it anyway so feel free to correct me or add additional information in the comments below :)
Meanwhile I’ll lookup BaaS. We might be running out of consonants. We need CaaS. Consonants as a Service.
The article I refferd to earlier can be found here
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Last modified on 2016-03-22