Anything as a Service (XaaS)

Image from Unsplash by Joan Gamell

Certainly, you have come across a service that is named “XaaS”, either SaaS, PaaS, etc… But what are these XaaS? Today I’ll attempt to explain to you a bit more about these customer services, give you some examples and broaden your XaaS knowledge.

What are XaaS?

This term refers to solutions that are presented ‘as a service’ to a customer. This can be any type of service that provides one or more features/functionalities to a customer, either for free or for a fee. These services may be accessible by an open interface (API), console, or more commonly via a web browser. These type of solutions are a subset of the cloud computing world.

An example that probably everyone knows is Dropbox. That storage service is known as a SaaS (Software as a Service). Dropbox provides a storage and sharing unit to a customer and that customer may pay a fee for extra storage space. This storage space is not installed in the customer’s machine and everything is accessible through a web browser.

Another example is AWS (Amazon Web Services), AWS presented as an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The services provided by IaaSs are extremely scalable and autonomous compute resources and are available as self-service, pay on-demand, and as-needed which are great alternatives to buying the hardware and scaling manually the hardware.

Key Characteristics of XaaS

Usually, XaaS advantageous characteristics are presented as ‘Little to none costs’, ‘Highly scalable’, ‘Device independence’, ‘Location independence’, ‘Multitenant’, Ease of access and in my opinion XaaSs could be almost considered the holy grail of small and upcoming businesses. If you are a start-up with a bright new idea, you can easily create your vision without having to worry about all the infrastructure would have otherwise needed to build. You can use these services to store your data, host your web applications, etc… The costs you’ll have are most of the time based on the traffic generated so if either your business is booming or staling, you will be paying accordingly to the amount of computing resources was spent.

Types of XaaS

There are a very long list of XaaS but i’ll just briefly mention the most common:

• Software as a Service (SaaS) — As the name indicates this is software provided as a service. Examples of these are: Dropbox, Salesforce, SAP, etc… and are usually used by human resources, accounting and helpdesk management.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — Provides the customer with highly scalable infrastructure solutions. Some examples of IaaSs are: AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) — Used as tools to aid with application development and provides a mix of infrastructure and software to the customer. Some examples of PaaSs are: Red Hat OpenShift, Netflix.
• Backend as a Service (BaaS) — Provides all types of services required in the backend of an application, database management, user authentication, push notifications, hosting, etc.. Some examples of BaaSs are: Firebase, Back4App, AWS Amplify.

I know it was a very brief topic but I just wanted to make a very simple ‘crash-course’ on XaaS. Later on, I’ll probably dive deeper into each of XaaS mentioned in this article, providing with advantages, disadvantages, when it should or not be used, etc..

I hope you enjoyed the read. Until next time