What is Azure Storage - PaaS or IaaS?

Question

I am confused from 2 different details from Microsoft. In one video Microsoft representative is mentioning about Azure Storage is PaaS but in Product list Microsoft is mentioning Azure Storage is IaaS.

So what does Azure Storage actually is?

Video link for PaaS (Check at 1:18 minute): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/azure-networking-fundamentals/azure-virtual-network-fundamentals

Product List mentioned as IaaS: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-azure/azure-iaas/#products

Answer 1

Actually, if you rely on the definition Storage is part of IaaS since by using Azure Storage you ara isolated from the HW layer and you can directly use storage services for your infrastructure

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-paas/

But also it can count as PaaS sometimes since PaaS services cover IaaS to provide more functionality to its users.

So its more related with your scenarios if you attach your storage to a VM it behaves as IaaS

but if you want to use additional features that Azure provides it can be thought as PaaS

Answer 2

I have the same question. What I found from 2021 seems to be pretty relevant: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-azure/azure-iaas/#products

Here is the thread from Microsoft Learn that I retrieved the answer from: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/221143/azure-storage-account-is-iaas-or-paas

But one thing that I did notice is that the term "storage" is a blanket statement—considering that under the "storage" umbrella, we have Blob, Azure Files, Queues, Tables, and Managed Disk. So yeah, I would lean toward it being IaaS initially. But can storage be used as PaaS? Certainly, once the underlying infrastructure is stripped it's pretty much PaaS at that point.