Where does Microsoft Azure Fit? SaaS or PaaS

One of the question which was doing buzz few years back was, under which category Microsoft Azure falls? SasS or PaaS. I strongly believe the first answer which comes to everyone's mind would be PaaS, let us understand the question itself first with Definition.

Software as a Service: Software as a service, or SaaS, is probably the most common type of cloud service development. With SaaS, a single application is delivered to thousands of users from the vendor’s servers. Customers don’t pay for owning the software; rather, they pay for using it. Users access an application via an API accessible over the web.

Each organization served by the vendor is called a tenant, and this type of arrangement is called a multitenant architecture. The vendor’s servers are virtually partitioned so that each organization works with a customized virtual application instance.

For customers, SaaS requires no upfront investment in servers or software licensing. For the application developer, there is only one application to maintain forb> multiple clients.

Now for Vendors, who develop SaaS kind of applications will require upfront investment on servers, Software licenses and they need to maintain and manage them. As they get more customers, their infrastructure has to change and they need to put more investment on people who manage this infrastructure. So it is most likely that vendor would take advantage of Microsoft Azure as Platform for hosting SaaS based application. In reality Azure will be the perfect place to put SaaS based application and it has Platform which can support both Multi Tenant and Single Tenant Applications.

Platform as a Service:In this variation of SaaS, the development environment is offered as a service. So Developer will be having ready made infrastructure to host their application. The developer uses the “building blocks” of the PaaS development environment to create his own custom application (Developer has to use Azure Blob objects to store stuff). As answered in the first place, Azure is the perfect place to use as PaaS.

Conclusion is Windows Azure fits into both Saas and Paas Architectures.