Also known as: SaaS
Software as a service (SaaS) is a model in which finished applications are hosted by a provider and accessed over the internet — usually by subscription — with no software to install and no servers for the user to run.1
Overview
SaaS is the top tier of the cloud stack: the provider runs the application, the runtime, the operating system, and the hardware, and you interact only through a browser or API. Email, document suites, chat tools, and CRM systems are common examples. Billing is typically per user or per month, and updates roll out centrally, so every customer runs the same maintained version.
Where it fits
SaaS hides the most infrastructure of the three cloud tiers, above platform as a service (where you still supply code) and infrastructure as a service (where you supply the OS too). It resembles managed hosting taken to completion — even the application is run for you. GopherTrunk is self-hosted software rather than SaaS, because it must run next to real radio hardware; only its decoded output could be pushed to a SaaS service.
Sources
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Software as a service — Wikipedia, on the SaaS cloud model. ↩