Cloud & DevOps
SaaS is a cloud delivery model in which software is hosted by a provider and accessed by users over the internet via a browser or thin client, with no local installation required.
In a SaaS model, the provider manages all infrastructure, security patches, and upgrades, so customers pay a recurring subscription fee and immediately get the latest version of the application. Multi-tenancy is a defining characteristic: a single instance of the application serves many customers with logical data isolation between them, which keeps provider costs low and savings are passed on as affordable pricing. SaaS products are especially well-suited to horizontal business functions — email, HR, accounting, CRM — because the same workflows apply across industries. Developers building SaaS applications must design for tenant isolation, usage-based billing, and elastic scalability from day one.
Example
Zoho CRM, Slack, and Freshdesk are SaaS products where thousands of companies log in to the same hosted application without managing any servers.
Related terms
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
PaaS is a cloud service model that provides a managed platform — including runtime environments, middleware, databases, and deployment pipelines — so developers can build and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
IaaS is a cloud service model that delivers virtualised computing resources — servers, storage, and networking — on demand over the internet, billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services — including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics — over the internet, enabling on-demand access, rapid scaling, and pay-per-use pricing.
Microservices
Microservices is an architectural style in which a large application is built as a collection of small, independently deployable services, each responsible for a specific business capability and communicating via APIs.
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