IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
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Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are online services that provide high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V, LXD, runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.
Typically IaaS solutions involve the use of a cloud orchestration technology like Open Stack, Apache Cloudstack or Open Nebula. This manages the creation of a virtual machine and decides on which hypervisor (i.e. physical host) to start it, enables VM migration features between hosts, allocates storage volumes and attaches them to VMs, usage information for billing and lots more.
An alternative to hypervisors are Linux containers, which run in isolated partitions of a single Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers. Containerisation offers higher performance than virtualization, because there is no hypervisor overhead. Also, container capacity auto-scales dynamically with computing load, which eliminates the problem of over-provisioning and enables usage-based billing.
IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles.
According to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the most basic cloud-service model is that of providers offering IT infrastructure – virtual machines and other resources – as a service to subscribers.
IaaS cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools of equipment installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud infrastructure providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.
Compare of products in the category IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
Payment model |
Integration with Active Directory |
Management Console |
Web access to the virtual machine console |
Hypervisors |
API |
Permissions settings |
VLAN |
Snapshots |
Notifications |
Live migration |
Analytics Tools |
DevOps Tools |
Databases |
Operating system |
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Suppliers IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
Vendors IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
F.A.Q. about IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service
Infrastructure as a Service Benefits
Cost savings: An obvious benefit of moving to the managed IaaS model is lower infrastructure costs. No longer do organizations have the responsibility of ensuring uptime, maintaining hardware and networking equipment, or replacing old equipment. IaaS technology also saves enterprises from having to buy more capacity to deal with sudden business spikes. Organizations with a smaller IT infrastructure generally require a smaller IT staff as well. The pay-as-you-go model also provides significant cost savings.
Scalability and flexibility: One of the greatest benefits of IaaS is the ability to scale up and down quickly in response to an enterprise’s requirements. Infrastructure as a Service providers generally have the latest, most powerful storage, servers and networking technology to accommodate the needs of their customers. This on-demand scalability provides added flexibility and greater agility to respond to changing opportunities and requirements.
Faster time to market: Competition is strong in every sector, and time to market is one of the best ways to beat the competition. Because IaaS vendors elasticity and scalability, organizations can ramp up and get the job done (and the product or service to market) more rapidly.
Support for DR, BC and high availability: While every enterprise has some type of disaster recovery plan, the technology behind those plans is often expensive and unwieldy. Organizations with several disparate locations often have different disaster recovery and business continuity plans and technologies, making management virtually impossible.
Focus on business growth: Time, money and energy spent making technology decisions and hiring staff to manage and maintain the technology infrastructure is time not spent on growing the business. By moving infrastructure to a global infrastructure services, organizations can focus their time and resources where they belong, on developing innovations in applications and solutions.
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS: What’s the Difference?
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is the next step up from IaaS products, where the provider also supplies the operating environment including the operating system, application services, middleware and other ‘runtimes’ for cloud users. It’s used for development environments where the business can focus on creating an app but wants someone else to maintain the deployment platform. It means you have much simpler workloads but you can’t necessarily be as flexible as you want.
At the highest level of orchestration is Software as a Service. In SaaS infrastructure applications are accessed on demand. Here you just open your browser and go, consuming software rather than installing and running it. A user simply logs on to access the provider’s application. Users can decide how the app will work but pretty much everything else is the responsibility of the software provider.
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Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
https://avinetworks.com/glossary/infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas/