1. Classification of Cloud Services

• IaaS, which provides computing and storage services.
• PaaS, which provides the platform environment in which software runs.
• SaaS, which delivers software services directly.

2. Application Scenarios for Cloud Services

Adopting cloud services can significantly reduce IT spending.

• Among IaaS services, cloud hosts and storage are the products with the highest adoption rates, followed by databases and network acceleration. IaaS is currently the primary cloud service model adopted by enterprises.
• Among PaaS services, big data analytics is the product with the highest adoption rate, followed by security monitoring, website building, and application development.
• Among SaaS services, enterprise communication software services are the most popular, including cloud email and unified communications platforms, followed by enterprise management software such as ERP and CRM.

3. The Cloud Services Market

• IaaS: crowded with giants, with little room for startups. IaaS has already developed to a relatively mature stage — Amazon and Microsoft abroad, Tencent and Alibaba at home. IaaS services are fairly homogeneous, margins are not high, and competition is fierce.
• PaaS: monopolized by BAT, yet niche areas still offer opportunities.
• SaaS: a hundred-billion-scale blue ocean market not to be missed. No SaaS giant has yet emerged in China; hardware infrastructure, network conditions, and security constrain the growth of domestic SaaS. As technology advances, these problems will gradually be solved. As small and medium-sized enterprises shift from extensive management to refined management, and as sales channels move online, enterprise-level

4. Deployment Models for Cloud Services

There are mainly four deployment models: public cloud, community cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.

• Public cloud: the infrastructure is provided by a third party, such as Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud. It is used over the Internet, is inexpensive, and shares service resources.
• Community cloud: the infrastructure is shared by several organizations and serves a community with a common concern.
• Private cloud: the infrastructure is used exclusively, providing effective control over data, security, and quality of service. A private cloud can be deployed in an enterprise data center or hosted in a colocation facility.
• Hybrid cloud: a hybrid cloud combines private and public clouds. It takes both data security and data sharing into account, and a tailored approach achieves the goal of saving money and staying secure.

5. The Advantages of PaaS

Take an e-commerce app as an example. The features it needs roughly involve: a user module (registration, login), a product display module (product information, image resource storage), search (voice search, image recognition), a purchasing system (payment), an advertising system (splash ads, banner ads), a customer service system (instant messaging, chatbot support), and so on. Before PaaS services became widespread, all of this required finding different programmers, and each item had to be hand-coded by people, consuming enormous effort and still not necessarily getting finished.

With PaaS, you only need to act like a procurement officer, picking suitable services and assembling them into your business logic, which greatly lowers development cost and speeds up development.

6. Technology Trends

• Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud resolves the conflict between data security and sharing. More and more medium and large enterprises will adopt the hybrid cloud model to deploy their own cloud services.

• DevOps
  To keep up with the Internet’s characteristics of rapid iteration and rapid release, adopting an integrated development-and-operations model is essential. DevOps incorporates many new concepts and technologies, such as CI/CD and Docker.

• Docker

Docker greatly eliminates the differences between environments, providing a unified runtime and deployment environment and making the DevOps process far more convenient.

• Data mining

Cloud services have a pronounced scale effect. Once you reach a certain scale, the amount of accumulated data is enormous. At that point, data mining — or in other words, AI — will become the core competitive technology.