Breakdown: the cloud infrastructure market
A guide to the cloud infrastructure market, breaking down IaaS vs PaaS, core app components, vendor tradeoffs, and what really drives developer decisions.
Last updated: June 16, 2025
Infrastructure and cloud is all about where software runs – the actual hardware, networking , and systems that allows you to magically type a URL into your browser, somehow loading a feature packed app full of data, all over the internet.
In the “old” days (i.e. high school), most apps ran locally – you’d get a copy of Excel via a CD, or download it from the web. All of the computing that Excel did – both the “graphical” frontend you interacted with, and all of the math that happened behind the scenes – took place on your laptop [1] Or your Dell Tower desktop, brother.. Data was stored as files on your computer. Even if Excel did sometimes communicate with the web, it was only to pull in a data source and get updated. You usually paid a one time fee to buy the software, or licensed it yearly.
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Things have changed a lot since then. Now, most software runs in the cloud. Instead of existing locally, it’s deployed on big servers in data centers across the world that developers either rent from companies like AWS and GCP, or less commonly build themselves. You access it over the internet, via your browser or a dedicated desktop app. You usually pay via a subscription model. It’s a whole different dynamic.
And with this advent of cloud came an entire new set of complicated decisions for developers. Which cloud should you deploy your app on? Should you use lower level infrastructure as a service, or pay up for the smoother managed experience? Do you have all of your stuff in one cloud, or split across multiple vendors? And why are there so damn many vendors who seemingly sell the same infrastructure?
This post will walk through everything that someone analyzing software companies would need to know about the infrastructure and cloud space:
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The components of an app: use cases for infrastructure
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Why anyone chooses a particular infrastructure vendor
So far in this category, we’ve covered AWS, Cloudflare , DigitalOcean, Heroku , and Vercel .
Types of infrastructure: IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
The best way to start wading through this massive world of infrastructure providers is to split vendors (more accurately: products) up into three groups, based on how much “work” they do for you, and how much you need to do yourse...