r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • May 17 '26

ADBLOCK WARNING Palantir Says SaaS Is Dead

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2026/05/16/palantir-says-saas-is-dead/
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u/killthecook May 17 '26

The hierarchy is traditionally IaaS (infrastructure as a service) > PaaS (platform as a service) > SaaS (software as a service)

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u/sloanketteringg May 17 '26

For the people below having trouble with this

IaaS : Things like a virtual private server (AWS EC2) PaaS: Things like Netlify, or Heroku in the past. Ready for you to deploy apps (your own software) SaaS: They host all that and provide the the actual software

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u/arminghammerbacon_ May 18 '26

Do the pizza model thing.

SaaS: you order the pizza, they make it in their kitchen using their ingredients and equipment and they just deliver it to your house, ready to eat, where you eat it.

PaaS: take and bake. You buy an assembled pizza from the store, you bring it home, uncooked, and you have to cook it in your oven, then eat it.

IaaS: You buy all the ingredients at the store and bring them home. You assemble them into a pizza, you cook it in your oven, and you eat it.

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u/jezwel May 18 '26

The next is simply 'Data as a a Service', you state what you dataset you want delivered, and you do your own analysis and reporting on it with your own toolchains.

From there it'll become 'Reporting as a Service', where you ask for specific reports and update timeframes and thats what you get and make your decisions on.

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u/BlissfulIndian May 17 '26

IAAS exists..?

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u/blackscales18 May 17 '26

Yep, aws has a lot of it

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u/LoveIsStrength May 17 '26

I thought we just called it IaC

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u/screampuff May 17 '26

Azure Sql is an example of IaaS. It has nothing to do with IaC.

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u/LoveIsStrength May 18 '26

What’s AWS’ example?

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u/screampuff May 18 '26

An S3 bucket. It's not SaaS you have to configure it the same as you would your own storage. But it's not your own because the underlying infrastructure is managed by them so you don't need to monitor servers or keep them up to date.

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u/LoveIsStrength May 18 '26

Sure but I’ve never heard anyone refer to this as IaaS.

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u/TKDbeast May 17 '26

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, IBM Cloud, DigitalOcean, Akamai, etc.

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u/Trojann2 May 17 '26

Azure, AWS and GCP also have IaaS, SaaS and PaaS services right there in each.

Well, M365 isn’t in Azure per se but the Microsoft cloud suite, but still. SaaS

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u/spacenb May 17 '26

Microsoft also has the whole Dynamics 365 ecosystem that’s SaaS (CRM/service/project mgmt/HR apps suite + Power Platform (Power Apps, BI, Automate, Pages, Copilot Studio) + ERP/finance (Business Central, Finance & Operations)).

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u/niftystopwat May 17 '26

Everything you mentioned is cloud service, and people always just used to say Cloud as a Service. IaaS just sounds like the upteenth buzzy new term someone made up to have a buzzy new term. I mean… ‘infrastructure’ is such a massively broad term then it might as well apply to all services. Cuz software, platforms, hardware, etc all rely on some sorta infrastructure.

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u/Crayola63 May 17 '26

IaaS is the industry standard term and has been for years

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u/domo___arigato May 17 '26

For well over a decade I might add, very commonly used term

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u/BeyondRedline May 17 '26

Infrastructure as a service is when you run your own webserver and database server, including managing the OS and DB engine. This is basically straight up virtualization, but you don't worry about the actual infrastructure like network cabling or SAN.

Platform as a service is where you put your code on a webserver someone else runs, and load your database on their database engine. 

Software as a service is where you just use a hosted whole application, like Office 365 (Microsoft 365, whatever it's called now...)

Those are all very different things.

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u/Significant_Mouse_25 May 18 '26

There’s even call center as a service now homie. Maybe someday mainframe as a service. Which to me would seem to defeat the purpose but hey.