Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model that provides virtualized computing resources over the internet. With IaaS, customers can rent virtualized hardware resources, such as servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure components, from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Key characteristics of IaaS include:
- Scalability: IaaS allows customers to scale resources up or down dynamically based on demand, enabling them to meet fluctuating workload requirements without upfront investment in physical hardware.
- Flexibility: Customers have full control over the configuration, management, and customization of virtualized infrastructure resources, including operating systems, middleware, and applications.
- Resource Pooling: IaaS providers maintain a pool of physical hardware resources, which are dynamically allocated and shared among multiple customers as virtualized instances.
- Self-Service Provisioning: Customers can provision and manage virtualized infrastructure resources through web-based interfaces or APIs without requiring manual intervention from the cloud provider.
- Pay-Per-Use Billing: IaaS services are typically billed on a consumption basis, with customers paying only for the resources they use, such as compute instances, storage capacity, data transfer, and other services.
Examples of IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, Google Cloud Compute Engine, and IBM Cloud Virtual Servers. Organizations use IaaS to build, deploy, and manage a wide range of IT infrastructure, including websites, applications, development and testing environments, data analytics, disaster recovery, and more, without the need to invest in physical hardware or infrastructure maintenance.
