There are three different deployment patterns available on Azure. They are
- Infrastructure as a Service (also popularly known as IaaS)
- Platform as a Service (also popularly known as PaaS)
- Software as a Service (also popularly known as SaaS)
The difference between these three deployment patterns is the level of control exercised by customer viz-a-viz Azure. The next image shows different levels of control within each of these deployment patterns.
Cloud services- IaaS, PaaS, SaaS
It is clear from the previous image that customers have more control using IaaS deployments and it keeps reducing from PaaS to SaaS deployments.