Which service model typically requires the customer to manage applications and data while the provider manages the underlying infrastructure?

The correct choice describes Platform as a Service (PaaS), which is designed to give customers a platform allowing them to develop, run, and manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. In a PaaS environment, the service provider manages the servers, storage, networking, and even the operating systems, while the customer handles the applications and data. This allows developers to focus on coding and deploying applications rather than worrying about the management of the hardware and software infrastructure.

While other service models also offer cloud computing capabilities, they do not fit this specific scenario as clearly. Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers fully managed applications over the internet, which means the provider takes care of everything, including applications, infrastructure, and data management on behalf of the customer. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides virtualized computing resources over the internet; in this model, the customer is responsible for managing applications, but they also must oversee larger aspects of the infrastructure. Function as a Service (FaaS) is a serverless computing model that runs code in response to events and abstracts the underlying infrastructure management but is not focused primarily on general application management like PaaS. Thus, PaaS stands out as the