Applications or database management systems may be offered as a service, or the server itself which contains a prebuilt application or database may be offered as a service and provisioned as a virtual machine. “Applications-as-a-Service” refers to both of these distinct approaches to service offerings.

What Is Applications-as-a-Service (AaaS)?

All applications and the servers that they run on should be considered candidates for provisioning through a self-service model. Well-known applications categories, such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, as well as custom-designed applications often can be provisioned, managed and monitored more effectively when the self-service approach is applied. Other types of critical application implementations, such as High Performance Computing (HPC) or even Big Data applications, can benefit from the self-service model.

• Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) 
  DBaaS refers to a variety of database infrastructure provisioning reference architectures. The database management system or the VM containing the database management system may be provisioned as the service offering. This may also be referred to as “Database infrastructure as a Service”. This section aggregates collateral pertaining to reference architectures and functional stress tests for various approaches to DBaaS as well as the DBaaS offerings from vCloud Air.


• High Performance Computing (HPC) 
  HPC projects innately benefit from simplistic and automated provisioning and efficient and inexpensive storage. This section aggregates collateral pertaining to HPC studies and success stories when run in virtualized environments. The approach of the Software Defined Datacenter (SDDC) enhances the overall effectiveness of HPC implementations in terms of open-ended provisioning as well as cumulative performance.


• Big Data and Hadoop 
  Big Data and Hadoop implementations can benefit from the simplicity and efficiency of virtualized infrastructure. When architected with a self-service model, those same applications can be easy to provision, monitor and manage. Many Big Data applications are becoming critical to the everyday functioning of 21st century companies. Modern business demand for immediately available resources and instantly provisioned extended server infrastructure means that virtualization has become a compelling component of these architectures.