IaaS vs PaaS When the Business Owns the Operating System
Which of the following best describes an environment where a business owns the application and operating system but requires the resources to host them in the cloud?
Community Votes
80% of anonymous learners picked answer A. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.
Community Insight
Trace the ownership boundary: whoever owns and patches the operating system is an IaaS customer, because PaaS and SaaS both leave the OS with the provider and give the customer only the application or the data.
The business owns the application and the operating system and only needs someone else to supply the compute, storage, and network to run them. That division of responsibility is IaaS, where the provider supplies the infrastructure and the customer keeps every layer above it.
Choosing PaaS because the business runs its own application. PaaS does let you deploy an application, but the provider owns the runtime and the operating system underneath it.
Community Discussion (11 comments)
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Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
Infrastructure as a Service rents virtualised compute, storage, and networking, and the customer installs and maintains everything above the hypervisor. Because the business owns both the application and the operating system, it needs exactly that layer: raw resources on which to host a platform it still controls. Operating system ownership is the deciding detail, since it places the responsibility boundary above the infrastructure the cloud provider supplies.Why the Other Options Are Wrong
PaaS gives the customer a managed platform with the operating system, runtime, and patching handled by the provider, so a business that owns its own OS is not consuming PaaS. SaaS delivers a finished application the customer merely configures, which is further still from owning an operating system. XaaS is a loose umbrella term for anything delivered as a service and is never the most specific answer when a defined model fits the scenario.Community Comment Notes
Commenters repeatedly isolate the operating system as the differentiator, which is the sound way to break the tie with PaaS. A few argue for PaaS by reading the phrase about needing hosting resources as needing a platform, but the stem says the business needs resources to host its own stack, not a managed runtime. Others note that the moment you own and patch the OS yourself, you have taken on exactly the work PaaS exists to remove.Official Reference
Exam Strategy
Walk the stack from the bottom up and ask where the customer stops managing: OS and above means IaaS, data and application only means PaaS, and configuration only means SaaS. Discard XaaS whenever a defined model matches.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which cloud service model leaves the operating system with the customer?
IaaS leaves the operating system, middleware, runtime, and application with the customer, while the provider runs virtualization, servers, storage, and networking; in PaaS it also takes the OS.
Why is XaaS the wrong choice when IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are all listed?
XaaS is an umbrella term meaning anything as a service and is not a defined model, so on the exam it is a distractor whenever the scenario clearly matches IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.