IaaS and Coffee...

IT and Coffee go hand in hand.   We all seem to be driven by caffine.   The office here is no exception.

I also love a good analogy - so how about Coffee and IaaS?

We are also very fortunate to have brilliant office near the CBD in Christchurch, with the OG Black & White Coffee Cartel downstairs.

Many people are familiar with the various 'as a Service' models.   We have On-Prem, do everything yourself, through to SaaS (Microsoft 365/Gmail etc) where everything lives in the cloud.

And some people push the transport analogy

On-premises is like owning a car. When you purchase a car, you’re responsible for its repairs etc. When you need to upgrade you just buy a new car.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) is a little bit like hiring a car. When you hire a car, you choose the car you want and drive it, but the  car doesn’t belong to you. When you want to upgrade you just hire a new  car.

PaaS (Platform as a Service) is like taking a taxi. You don’t drive a vehicle yourself, but simply tell the driver where you need to go and relax in the back seat.

SaaS (Software as a Service) is like going by train. Trains  have assigned routes, and you share the ride with other passengers. (but  without having to sit with them – you all have your very own carriage).

So what about Coffee?

Well, we used to get a morning coffee takeaway from the cafe and that was us for the day.   But we crunched the numbers and decided that it would be cheaper just to shell out for the coffee machine.

So On-Premise is like owning the coffee machine.  We are responsible for everything.  Making the coffee, ordering the beans and milk,  cleaning the machine and bench, regular maintenance and and even dealing with breakdown of the machine and 'supply chain issues' (too few/too many beans).

At the other end of the scale is PaaS/SaaS is like walking into the café, ordering what you want and walking out the door enjoying your fresh brew.  You just ask for what you want,  the café takes care of ensure the beans are there, there is a barista to make your coffee of choice, the machines are maintained and cleaned on a regular basis.

From the amount of coffee shops and cafés that are around and the number of people frequenting those places, it's quite easy to see the value of the 'as-a-service' model.  Sure it costs you $5 a cup (or more), but you don't need to deal with all the hassles.

Softsource vBridge IaaS and Managed Services is much the same. While it may not look like much from the outside, we are constantly maintaining and upgrading the platform, applying firmware and security updates, replacing hardware as it ages out and generally making the customers life easier.

If you look at the numbers it may seem that running On-premise is cheaper.  But that often under represents the ongoing time, maintenance and operations overheads that are associated with that decision.  Everything may be running fine,  but it is you that needs to deal with outages and failures, and replacing equipment as it ages.  Issues and interruptions occur all the time.

And if you'll excuse me.  I need to go and clean the kitchen bench again.....