HAAS - Hardware As A Service

SaaS or Software as a Service has picked up the momentum. The user pays the software for only what they use. This concept picked up in the industry because of many advantages. HAAS Hardware as a Service is catching up slowly. But was this not already existing in the form of hosting services? Is it something new? In hosting services, user for the hosting space for the period of time irrespective of the usage. Agreed, hosting services was existing but HAAS is not the same.

In HAAS, the user pay for the actual usage and not the usage decided in the beginning. In a hosting service, the end user for e.g. have to pay XUSD for say 1GB of space and 1 Web Application for 1 year. Irrespective of the usage of the site, the user need to pay the hosting provider. What if the user need to pay based on the amount of data that is transferred to the site or the amount of processing power the site uses instead of a fixed amount decided in the beginning. What if the application can take any amount of load i.e. scalability is available on- demand. This is possible through HAAS. User pays for the actual usage and gets the features of an enterprise class application.

Amazon has opened up the arena using Amazon Web Services. They have multiple products like Amazon EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud), Amazon S3(Simple Storage Service), Amazon SQS(Simple Queue Service). The whole idea is to achieve the application functionality by using the 3 above services. The unit of work is stored in the S3 area and the EC2 will use that unit to process the application in a scalable manner. And the benefits to the user, they get their application functional without spending heavily to setup the datacenters.