Everything as a Service

As the benefits of cloud computing have started to become fully realised we have seen the birth of the As-a-Service model.

Software as a Service (Saas), Platform as a Service (Pass), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

This combined with the birth of the DevOps mentality has lead to a shift in how we approach the provision of the services and functionality that we always require on any new project.

While each variant of this approach has differences in the degree to which you are involved in the detail all carry similar benefits compared to the traditional do-it-yourself attitude.

Details as a Service

While many of us may take enormous pride in managing and maintaining boxes and servers ultimately the amount of effort required to do this is often out of the proportion with the value derived.

Many of us will also have spent many frustrating hours dealing with an issue related to a Java install, a file system problem or a connectivity issue. We aren't in the business of maintaining servers but it is a necessary evil to have a functioning software delivery pipeline.

As-a-Service enables us to abstract ourselves from this necessary yet effort draining detail and focus instead on the business of delivering value to our customers via deploying software to these servers.

By taking advantage of an army of people dedicated to keeping our servers up and running we gain reliability while reducing to almost zero our effort on these day to day activities.

Expertise as a Service

Building and deploying software involves many different tasks, each with there own skillsets, as we become more experienced we will gain a certain level of skill in all these areas but it is unlikely we could ever call ourselves experts in all of them, we are also unlikely to be able to dedicate enough time to achieving that level of proficiency across the board.

We therefore do the best we can.

The functionality delivered via As-a-Service is backed by experts in their field, people who have amassed expert knowledge in the service they are offering that it would be impossible or at least impractical for us to attain.

This engineers a situation where we are essentially filling our team with experts in every aspect of delivery amounting to years and years of experience being added to our team in specific technologies, domains and functionalities.

Compared to this there is no benefit in developing these systems in house, while it may be fun we cannot hope to improve on what is delivered by experts employed to achieve excellence.

Availability as a Service

When we construct infrastructure for use in deploying and hosting our code there is generally an on-going cost to its availability, maintenance and provisioning.

This cost is usually not in line with our utilisation of the infrastructure, although it will rapidly increase whenever that infrastructure is down for what ever reason.

As-a-Service in most cases is like any other product or service you may buy with it being charged based on your usage.

This can obviously lead to cost savings for the services we need to be available but only use infrequently, but the other consequence is that we have a virtually unlimited supply of services where are need scales with the amount of delivery we are trying to achieve.

As an example, when provisioning our own build system we are likely to be faced with a choice of imposing a cap on the amount of throughput our developers can achieve or hugely over provisioning at great cost.

An As-a-Service build system can start off small but via some tweaks to settings and a proportional increase in cost can be made to achieve more. As developers get into a groove the build system can be made to adapt and ensure every last ounce of effort can be converted into the production of code.

Within software engineering we have a healthy track record of laziness, trying to use our skills and abilities to make our work lives easier.

As-a-Service is the ultimate manifestation of this attitude with the goal of ensuring developers are almost entirely focused on writing code.

While we may be capable of doing or learning to do all these tasks the question you have to ask yourself is would that add any value.

The emergence of several major cloud providers and the competition starting to grow between them means the answer to that is almost certainly no.