Frequently asked questions
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Some practical examples of the hybrid cloud in action:
- Many customers take advantage of the hybrid cloud to achieve global scale, increased reliability, AI-enabled security, and cost savings offered by the public cloud. In highly regulated industries, data residency requirements may mandate that certain sets of data must be kept on-premises, while other workloads can reside in the public cloud.
- If an application resides on-premises or in a private cloud, sudden spikes in demand may overload the capacity—such as season events like online shopping or tax filing. When demand spikes, organizations can tap into additional computing resources in the public cloud, sometimes called “cloud bursting”—where the hybrid cloud environment allows the on-premises infrastructure to “burst through” to the public cloud.
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Most cloud computing services fall into four broad categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), serverless, and software as a service (SaaS). These are sometimes called the cloud computing “stack” because they build on top of one another.
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This is the most basic category of cloud computing services. With IaaS, you rent IT infrastructure—servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, and operating systems—from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.
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Platform as a service refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering, and managing software applications. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network, and databases needed for development.
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Overlapping with PaaS, serverless computing focuses on building app functionality without spending time continually managing the servers and infrastructure required to do so. The cloud provider handles the setup, capacity planning, and server management for you. Serverless architectures are highly scalable and event-driven, only using resources when a specific function or trigger occurs.
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Software as a service is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure, and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their phone, tablet, or PC.
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Edge computing allows customers to run VMs, containers and data services at edge locations. By bringing the power of cloud computing to IoT devices closer to where the data resides, companies can use machine learning and AI to unlock new business opportunities. Connecting IoT devices and systems closer to your users, the data, or both allow for real-time insights and experiences, delivered by highly responsive and contextually aware apps.
Learn more about intelligent cloud computing and the intelligent edge
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Azure hybrid is all about flexibility and choice, so however you want to say it is fine by us—they’re really both correct.
