Introduction to IaaS
Introduced in the year 2012 by Oracle, IaaS is a cloud computing platform based model, known as Infrastructure as a service. Formerly IaaS was termed as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). Cloud computing has three distinct layers such as PaaS, SaaS, out of which IaaS is one. Here the customer organization outsources its IT Infrastructures, where customers access resources such as (server, storage, virtual machines) over the internet. Those resources are accessible in the cloud computing platform based on pay per use model. Here the clients are billed only for the services used, further, it helps to reduce cost and complexity of investing and managing a physical server.
What is IaaS?
- IaaS defined as “Infrastructure as a service”, provides visualized computing features to the clients through the internet. Also known as hardware as a service, it provides resources that belong to virtualized hardware termed as computing infrastructure that offers virtual servers storage, networking connections and IP address.
- IaaS cloud computing is distinguished into three models namely public, private and hybrid cloud. Public cloud states its location in a cloud computing platform, whereas in the case of private cloud the infrastructure is stored in customer place. In Conclusion, the hybrid cloud is the combination of both models where the customer chooses the best alternative.
- In detail, Public clouds are a common method of deploying cloud computing. Microsoft Azure is an example of a public cloud where cloud utilities like storage and servers are operated by third-party buyers and delivered over the web.
- The third-party buyers are the cloud service providers who own the hardware, software and several infrastructures. Public cloud costs the users less as no physical hardware or software needs to be purchased, the user has only to pay for the service he owns. Moreover, it provides high reliability and scalability with negligible maintenance.
- Private Cloud as its name says it comprises of resources to be used by one organization only. The private cloud can be installed physically at organization premises or else can be hosted by third-party cloud service providers. Private clouds are mostly used by government agencies, institutions, etc. This model provides more flexibility, greater security, and high scalability.
- Hybrid Cloud is comprised of both public cloud and private cloud. In a hybrid cloud, data and information can be transferred for better flexibility. Here we can say that the public cloud is used for where less security persists like webmail, whereas private cloud used when security is at peak and for critical business operations. A hybrid cloud is used for better control and cost-effectiveness that it provides.
How does IaaS Works?
IaaS points to an infrastructure either physical or virtual that is provided by the cloud provider. IaaS has lots of resources such as network, server, storage, virtualization, so it depends upon the customer to choose its resources wisely and as per need. Apart from the management of the infrastructures, it provides billing management too, where the user is billed as per the services rendered.
Benefits of IaaS
IaaS offers lots of benefits to its customers ensuring affordability and business growth. Given below are few benefits:
- IaaS provides a “pay per use” scheme, which says the services provided can be used as per needed, and users need to pay only for the services utilized.
- The services provided by IaaS are quite scalable as they make sure that the resources are available to the users at the desired time and demand and also ensure that there is no wastage of capacity if left out.
- It saves a lot of time and cost as the cloud service provider is responsible for setting and maintaining the physical hardware.
- The service provided is unaffected and remains constant, even though any hardware failure occurs.
- It provides a great value of flexibility as it scales down the resources quickly as per the needs of customers.
- IaaS mostly focuses on business growth as there any hardly any time is spent on technological and business decisions and how to maintain the infrastructure. IaaS takes care of all of these.
- IaaS cloud computing platform provides secure data centers with 24/7/365 availability.
Examples of IaaS
- IaaS is highly flexible and it’s basically used in Ecommerce and Non-e-commerce platforms.
- A suitable example is Amazon Web Services (AWS EC2), where it provides scalability to host cloud-based applications, Moreover EC2 users need not have physical servers, AWS provides a virtual environment to work on. In this, the cost is minimized and the users only pay for the services they booked.
- In the Case of the E-commerce platform, it depends upon the user’s interest in hosting the applications either on cloud or on-premise. Here also the users pay for the services actually used (i.e. hosting plan for the server).
- A virtualized Data Center is established to provide cloud hosting options, integrating the cloud operations. The Data Center contains several Virtual servers that meet the user demand as per their business requirements.
- Another cloud computing service provider known as Digital Ocean, founded in the year 2011, which provides IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) for open source developers. Mostly Digital Ocean provides droplets, where a developer can resize the droplets after creating them. Developers can scale and grow their business through the Digital Ocean more efficiently.
- IaaS can manage big data to handle large workloads and integrate with BI tools.
- GCE (Google Compute Engine) is an IaaS component that runs search engine, Gmail and other services.
Conclusion
IaaS provides cost-cutting on IT infrastructure for mid-level to large scale industries. IaaS is also known as Cloud storage, where clients store their data on the cloud and can access the data from anyplace. Infrastructure as a Service is the most flexible cloud model whose main purpose is for deployment and development of web applications. Cloud computing as an evolving technology provides the best solution in terms of IaaS which provides high scalability and flexibility on operations.
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