Today's public clouds offer a range of compute services targeting broad categories of user needs. These services tend to fall into one of four categories:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Containers as a service (CaaS)
- Platform as a service (PaaS)
- Functions as a service (FaaS)
Services in these categories cater to different needs, primarily through abstracting away increasing levels of the underlying infrastructure and associated operational efforts. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) targets each of these general categories with dedicated products, illustrated as follows:
Google Cloud Compute Services—from bottom to top, services are in order of increasing level of abstraction