be rapidly and elastically provisioned in some cases automatically to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in to the consumer the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time measured service cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service e g storage processing bandwidth and active user accounts resource usage can be monitored controlled and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service software as a service saas the capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider 39 s applications running on a cloud infrastructure the applications are accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a web browser e g web based email the consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network servers operating systems storage or even individual application capabilities with the possible exception of limited user specific application configuration settings platform as a service paas the capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer created or acquired applications created using programming languages and tools supported by the provider the consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including networks servers operating systems or storage but has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations infrastructure as a service iaas the capability provided to the consumer is.