While in the cloud-native world a lot of artifacts have been slowly abstracted and automated, pre-production environments are still created using hand-crafted scripts. To make matters worse, every team like development, QA, DevOps, security have their own snowflake environment & snowflake pipelines to determine whether a pull request is ready for production or not. This problem is being solved by leading platforms like Roost which brings the As-a-Service model to pre-production environments with “Environments as a Service.”

In this blog, I am going to cover how EaaS fits into the As-a-Service ecosystem.

What is As-a-Service

The As-a-service model evolved with two parallel streams:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS) model promoted by SalesForce

2. Amazon Web Service's cloud storage and compute offering branded as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

There are various parts of the as-a-service model but the core part is services being delivered over the internet. There are other common well-known aspects like the ability to scale up and down as needed, failover and disaster recovery managed by the cloud provider, etc.

When defining As-a-service, the standard 9 layer architecture is used to classify what part is managed by the provider and what part is managed by the practitioner. Following are the layers:

1. Networking

2. Storage

3. Servers

4. Virtualization

5. Operating System

6. Middleware

7. Runtime

8. Data

9. Applications

In the case of Iaas, the provider manages 1-4. In the case of SaaS provider manages the whole nine yards (pun is intended).

Cloud Rebranding and the Birth of Platform as a Service (PaaS)

In the early 2010s, one fine day, with the trick of a magic wand, every company became a cloud company and every machine which was not a desktop became a cloud server. This was an interesting battle of branding as every company which was not offering public cloud services or was not using the same, rebranded itself as a private cloud company.

Interestingly Platform as a Service evolved as two parallel trends:

1. Public cloud providers enriching offerings beyond barebones compute and storage like Elastic Map Reduce (the earliest service I can remember)

2. OpenStack emerging as the savior of all private cloud (and later getting martyrdom)

In the case of Paas, the provider manages 1-7.

Environments-as-a-Service

In the standard model, EaaS manages everything except the application tier.