Anything as a Service
Obviously, IDE as a service was not the first service offering of AWS, but it fit well with their philosophy of Anything as a Service (often abbreviated as XaaS). By going beyond their initial offering of co-located virtual machines, Amazon has redefined existing infrastructure services. Providing configurable services and software implementations of hardware found in data centers has allowed them to develop complementary products such as load balancing, content delivery networks, and security plus, failover and replication solutions. Extending their internal tools or purchasing synergistic products such as Cloud9 has provided the full stack developer an opportunity to use a well thought out, low cost, pay for use, integrated suite.
AWS provides three primary categories of service offerings:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Software as a Service (SaaS)