I’ve been pondering the real user-perspective difference between one-click-installs (OCI) to bring a service online versus true “as a service” (XaaS) type models.  My current thinking is that the goal for all of these XaaS offerings is that the user needn’t bother going through the sometimes tedious installation process and to remove other management overhead.  Most of the proper XaaS offerings leverage some sort of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the backend to provide their XaaS offering.

What if, however, public IaaS service providers provided OCI images that “just work”?  If the service just came online and simply worked with a sane base configuration, this seems like it would accomplish most of what the XaaS offerings are trying to address.  I intend to play with this more to see how it works in the end, but this seems like it could be an interesting new selling feature of public cloud offerings.  If the public cloud you are using provides OCI images for services you are interested in using (but don’t really want to go through the process of setting up), it seems like that would be a good value proposition.  And when you compare this to the monthly price of all the XaaS offerings, you may very well be able to save some money, and also have “dedicated” resources for your specific project.

Time to start hacking away at this.  I’ll be sure to report my findings, and maybe we’ll see some fruits of this labor in our DreamCompute product.