What’s more important to you? That your infrastructure works for your applications or that your applications work for your infrastructure? That’s what we thought, and the growing world of as-a-service is turning the old infrastructure-first model right-side up. Developers are now demanding that any application they can dream up will be supported by shape-shifting as-a-service infrastructure.

Noam Shendar, chief operating officer of Zadara Storage, Inc., a Storage-as-a-Service provider, said that as-a-service is winning everywhere and heralding a whole new IT philosophy. “The philosophy is around agility. And agility means doing what you need to do when you realize that you need to do it,” he said.

Shendar told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that customers once had to buy a ton of storage up front only to find that they didn’t really need it. He said that now they can buy what they need, use it to the last drop, and come back for more only as it’s needed. “With as-a-service, we don’t get to hide. We have to make it work every day, and we have to earn our keep every day,” he stated.

As-a-service and on-prem: Bridging two worlds

Shendar said that the appeal of cloud and as-a-service generally isn’t really about on-prem or off, but about who’s doing the heavy lifting so developers can focus on the future. He said that Zadara’s on-prem Storage-as-a-Service now makes up a third of the company’s revenue, and this tells him that “customers are not going to move everything to the cloud, but it does tell you that they do want as-a-service on-prem.”

He added that consumption pricing is also just a footnote compared to the real reason for as-a-service: “You know it’s as-a-service if it doesn’t come with the headaches of ownership.”

Watch the full video interview below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE