I had a lecture in college which shortly focused on cloud computing. When seeing through the material, I found the professor categorized Microsoft Azure as Platform-as-a-Service.
In Addition to that, I recently gave a presentation which also partly focused on Azure, and afterwards was asked which of the three models (IaaS, SaaS or PaaS) Azure would belong to.
I replied that it offers solutions for all three models and therefore, a categorization cannot be limited to just one of the models. My professor (a different one than before) said I was partly wrong, classifying it as PaaS with additional possibilities for IaaS and SaaS. Wikipedia also lists Microsoft Azure as an example for PaaS.
Question: Can anyone tell me why Azure is just sort of "labeled" as PaaS?
Just to clarify: The presentation I gave was some sort of oral exam with viewers, I did not have the guts to start a discussion with the prof evaluating me.
Your professor was right, especially with the statement "classifying it as PaaS with additional possibilities for IaaS and SaaS." As you said yourself, Wikipedia also lists Microsoft Azure as an example for PaaS. It comes down to this. SaaS exists on top of an underlying PaaS. What makes Azure a PaaS is their data centers allowing you access into it plus Azure Active Directory authenticating and authorizing into it on top of it. Without these you could not deliver the SaaS model such as Office 365 which sits on top of it. Microsoft Office 365 is a SaaS offering, built on top of Azure. When I interviewed for a Microsoft position a few years ago, I was asked what was "Azure"? I actually missed this question, because I wasn’t up on Azure at the time. The correct answer told to me then was "cloud platform". So there you have it.