IaaS and On-Premises

Besides PaaS, serverless is frequently compared with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and On-Premises solutions to expose its differences. IaaS is another strategy to deploy cloud solutions where you hire virtual machines and is allowed to connect to them to configure everything that you need in the guest operating system. It gives you greater flexibility, but it comes with more responsibilities. You need to apply security patches, handle occasional failures, and set up new servers to handle usage peaks. Also, you pay the same per hour whether you are using 5% or 100% of the machine s CPU.

On-Premises is the traditional kind of solution where you buy the physical computers and run them inside your company. You get total flexibility and control with this approach. Hosting your own solution can be cheaper, but it happens only when your traffic usage is extremely stable. Over or under provisioning computers is so frequent that it's hard to have real gains using this approach, even more when you add the risks and costs to hire a team to manage those machines. Cloud providers may look expensive, but several detailed use cases prove that the return of investment (ROI) is larger running on the cloud than On-Premises. When using the cloud, you benefit from the economy of scale of many gigantic data centers. Running on your own exposes your business to a wide range of risks and costs that you'll never be able to anticipate.