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Cloud Basics · ~8 min · 2 quick checks

The cloud menu: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS

Cloud offerings come in three levels of "how much do you want to manage yourself?":

  • IaaS (Infrastructure) — raw VMs, disks, networks. You manage the OS up. EC2, DigitalOcean droplets.
  • PaaS (Platform) — you bring code, they run it. Vercel, Heroku, AWS Lambda.
  • SaaS (Software) — you just use the finished app. Gmail, Notion, ChatGPT.

Pizza analogy: IaaS = ingredients, PaaS = delivery, SaaS = restaurant.