Beyond IaaS and PaaS: An Extended Cloud Taxonomy for Computation, Storage and Networking

Abstract

Cloud computing is currently classified by the generally accepted terms IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. These are not precise enough to give users and providers a common terminology to differentiate between existing cloud offers. Furthermore, there is no common and accepted terminology for storage and network cloud services. Terms like StaaS and NaaS have been coined but lack a clear definition. This paper contributes a fine-grained taxonomy for computation, storage and network services which is still compliant with existing terminology. Our taxonomy is based on abstractions cloud services provide to tenants, it does not consider implementation aspects. In addition to our taxonomy, we provide a classification of many existing services and simple decision trees that allow an easy classification of any cloud offer of interest. Our comprehensive and fine-grained taxonomy is a new basis for the determination of existing and future cloud offerings.