Comment by nonameiguess
1 year ago
This is not the industry-standard or NIST definitions of these terms. Something like Google Workspace Suite is Software as a Service. Something like Heroku (or Dreamhost or Wordpress) is Platform as a Service. Something like EC2 and S3 are Intrastructure as a Service. The distinction is renting out undifferentiated server space that a customer installs their own software onto. If you rent a VPS from Linode and install self-hosted Wordpress, that's IaaS. If you buy Wordpress's managed hosting, that's PaaS.
Well, it may not be the industry standard definition, but it is the definition used in the actual regulation:
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Infrastructure as a Service product
or
IaaS product
means a product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or “trial” offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of “managed” products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and “unmanaged” products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer. The term is also inclusive of “virtualized” products and services, in which the computing resources of a physical machine are split between virtualized computers accessible over the internet (
e.g.,
“virtual private servers”), and “dedicated” products or services in which the total computing resources of a physical machine are provided to a single person (
e.g.,
“bare-metal servers”).
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So Dreamhost counts, any web host where you can run arbitrary PHP code would count. Wordpess.com -- where you cannot actually modify the PHP code yourself -- would not count as IaaS. But any web host that allows you to install applications on your own, or run any of your own code, would count as IaaS by this regulation.
> Wordpess.com -- where you cannot actually modify the PHP code yourself -- would not count as IaaS.
However, I am able to write a WP plug-in and install it on my Wordpress.com account. In that case, I am modifying PHP code and running it. Sure, it might not do "AI" stuff but it can do some stuff and I'm assuming that the law would transmute over time to include stuff other than "AI" stuff.