As a service
As a service (AAS) is a business model in which something is being presented to a customer, either internal or external, as a service.[1] As-a-Service offerings provide endpoints for customers/consumers to interface with which are usually API driven, but can commonly be controlled via a web console in a user's web browser. The term XaaS can mean "anything as a service".[lower-alpha 1]
Internally these often complex systems generally possess a high degree of internal automation which generally provide varying levels of fault tolerance and resiliency, the ability to scale up/down in or out to meet capacity and performance requirements of the workloads submitted to the service by its users/consumers, and are usually intended to operate their day to day functions without the need for human intervention. IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) features most commonly included in this automation package are compute, storage, network, telemetry, and logging/accountability features, but most IaaS components owe some portion of their workload to these services. The current cloud computing ecosystem contains multiple cloud providers, each with their own menu of these services for their customers to consume on-demand or in some cases even with pre-scoped capacity agreements.[3]
AAS services have the following features:
- They are based on open source projects with little to no licensing costs
- Require little to no human intervention to perform their tasks/roles
- Could be scaled up or down depending on level / volume needed
- Maintained and supported internally by the cloud provider
- Use resources that are expendable for reuse by other IaaS tasks and services
Using AAS services can offer a large cost savings over traditional vendor-provided infrastructure and server based equivalencies. When deciding on XaaS, one has to consider vendor-specific lock-in features which can be more limited than other similar open source projects.
Examples
Legitimate business models
Criminal business models
Service | Abbr. |
---|---|
Exploit as a service | EaaS |
Hacking as a service[17] | HaaS |
Phishing as a service[18] | PhaaS |
Ransomware as a service[19] | RaaS |
Defunct business models
Service | Abbr. |
---|---|
Windows as a service[20][lower-alpha 2] | WaaS |
See also
Notes
- sometimes called EaaS or "Everything as a Service"[2]
- A feature made obsolete with the release of Windows 11.
References

- Robin Hastings, Making the Most of the Cloud: How to Choose and Implement the Best Services (2013), p. 3.
- Duan, Yucong; Fu, Guohua; Zhou, Nianjun (2015). Everything as a Service(XaaS) on the Cloud: Origins, Current and Future Trends. IEEE 8th International Conference on Cloud Computing. IEEE Computer Society. pp. 621–628.
- Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "Cloud Architecture Fundamentals". YouTube.
- Lins, Sebastian; Pandl, Konstantin D.; Teigeler, Heiner; Thiebes, Scott; Bayer, Calvin; Sunyaev, Ali (1 August 2021). "Artificial Intelligence as a Service". Business & Information Systems Engineering. 63 (4): 441–456. doi:10.1007/s12599-021-00708-w. S2CID 236634395.
- Linkin, Peter (2022). Data Management as a Service for Dummies (PDF). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-119-87093-7.
- Varghese, Blesson; Wang, Nan; Li, Jianyu; Nikolopoulos, Dimitrios S. (October 27, 2017). Edge-as-a-Service: Towards Distributed Cloud Architectures (PDF). EdgeComp Symposium 2017. Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing. arXiv:1710.10090.
- Rahmani, Hossein; Sundararajan, Elankovan; Ali, Zulkarnain Md.; Zin, Abdullah Mohd. Encryption as a Service (EaaS) as a Solution for Cryptography in Cloud. 4th International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics (ICEEI 2013.
- Mawani, Vinod; Kalshetty, Kalleshwar; Kadam, Aniket; Chavan, Sagar. "Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS): Interfacing Android Application with Cloud to Save Smartphone Energy" (PDF). Spvryan's International Journal of Engineering Sciences & Technology. 2 (5). Archived from the original (PDF) on 22 April 2018.
- Hopfgartner, Frank; Hanbury, Allan; Müller, Henning; Eggel, Ivan (December 2018). "Evaluation-as-a-Service for the Computational Sciences: Overview and Outlook". Journal of Data and Information Quality. 10 (4): 1–32. doi:10.1145/3239570. S2CID 53115327.
- I. A. Umoren, and M. Z. Shakir, EVaaS: a novel on-demand outage mitigation framework for electric vehicle enabled microgrids. in Proc. IEEE Globecom WS, Abu Dhabi, 2018, p. 6.
- I. A. Umoren, S. S. A. Jaffary, M. Z. Shakir, K. Katzis and H. Ahmadi, "Blockchain-Based Energy Trading in Electric Vehicle Enabled Microgrids," in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2020.2988904.
- Vo, Tri Hoang; Fuhrmann, Woldemar; Fischer-Hellmann, Klaus-Peter (February 2018). "Privacy-preserving user identity in Identity-as-a-Service". 2018 21st Conference on Innovation in Clouds, Internet and Networks and Workshops (ICIN): 1–8. doi:10.1109/ICIN.2018.8401613. ISBN 978-1-5386-3458-5. S2CID 49556849.
- "Global IT Management as a Service (ITMaaS) Market 2014-2018". September 30, 2014.
- Phil (February 22, 2017). "QA Services vs QA as a Service: Is There a Difference?". Test IO.
- Bu, Chao; Wang, Xingwei; Cheng, Hui; Huang, Min; Li, Keqin (January 2019). "Routing as a service (RaaS): An open framework for customizing routing services". Journal of Network and Computer Applications. 125: 130–145. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2018.10.010. S2CID 54077583.
- Tesfamicael, Aklilu Daniel; Liu, Vicky; Caelli, William. Design and Implementation of Unified Communications as a Service Based on the Open Stack Cloud Environment (PDF). 2015 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence & Communication Technology. doi:10.1109/CICT.2015.133.
- Brian, Vincent (December 2018). Understanding Hacking-as-a-Service Markets (PDF) (MS). Arizona State University. Retrieved 2022-07-22.
- "Catching the big fish: Analyzing a large-scale phishing-as-a-service operation". Microsoft. September 21, 2021.
- "Ransomware-as-a-service: Understanding the cybercrime gig economy and how to protect yourself". Microsoft. May 9, 2022.
- Keizer, Gregg (July 13, 2021). "Say goodbye to all that: Microsoft ends Windows-as-a-Service". Computerworld.