Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model with the main characteristic that instead of owning and running your facility, servers, and network, you can rent flexible computing capacity when you need it and pay it accordingly.
Key Benefits:
- Reduced acquisition cost since the resources already exist and end customer typically pays for only the resources that are used
- Pay for usage, not capacity was the original model, but there are some new sub models where you pay for the usage and any other combination of the volume used
- Reduced environmental impact on the resources used on local (on premise) computing centre. All required resources are located at single data centre, which serves all end users. However, you need to look at the environmental impact of the data centre itself
The key characteristics of Infrastructure as a Service:
- Resources needed are delivered as a service, including servers, network, memory, CPU, disk space. In addition, higher implementation models such as operating systems and databases are also provided
- Approach enables super dynamic scaling of infrastructure rented so that virtual infrastructure scales up and down based on an application resource needs, with or without user control
- There are many monetization models implemented, but variable cost service using fixed price per resource component is the most used model found in IaaS offerings
- On the same infrastructure typically coexist multiple computing resources (multitenant model)
- Enterprise grade infrastructure allows mid-size companies to benefit from the aggregate compute resource pools, which enables quick scaling up and down, keeping all high quality resource characteristics regardless of quantity of service used
A typical IaaS conceptual architecture layer usually found in cloud computing is shown below.
