Hello and welcome to this lecture, whilst you'll be looking at some of the different cloud service models that you will likely encounter as you become more familiar with cloud computing. So now you have an idea of the different cloud types that there are, public, private, and hybrid. You will need to know which service model you would like to deploy within it. There are many different service models available, and more being defined all the time, although three of the most common are that of infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service. Each service offering provides a different level of manageability and customization over your solution. So let's look at the lowest level of customization first, that being software as a service. You would have used many examples of software as a service applications, perhaps without even realizing it. Software as a service allows for the delivery of an application that can be widely distributed and accessed. An example of this would be Google's email service, Gmail. This email-based application is fully managed by Google and is accessed over the internet, and there are no requirements to install any software on your local device to be able to use it. They are usually simple in their design, focusing on the ease of use to appeal to the wider audience. 

From the user perspective, this offers the least amount of customization to the application itself. Platform as a service. This service offering gives a greater level of management and control to you, as you have access to an application framework that sits on top of the operating system and up. The underlying architecture, the host hardware, network components, and operating system are typically managed by the vendor and taken care of from a maintenance and support perspective, which makes this a great deployment service for developers. Developers are then free to focus and concentrate on developing great new apps sitting on top of the platform. Infrastructure as a service. This provides the highest level of customization and management. This service allows you to architect your own portion of the cloud by configuring a virtual network, which is segmented from other networks, allowing you to deploy any resources you require. In addition to this, you have the ability to configure instances from the operating system and up, including the type of operating system you install. This service offers the highest level of customization. 

However, the underlying host is still managed by the vendor for maintenance and security purposes. There are a number of other service models, such as disaster recovery as a service, communications as a service, and monitoring as a service. For the purpose of this course, we do not need to delve into these. However, I wanted you to be aware that there are more of these services that are making their way into the industry. For now, though, as this is an introduction, you simply need to focus and be aware of software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service, as these are the most common within the industry. That has brought me to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, I shall be explaining some of the common use cases of cloud computing.