Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Synonyms

Cloud infrastructure

Definition

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) describes a facility for provisioning and managing, virtualized and shared computational, storage, and network capacity, which users acquire and release dynamically via simple Internet interfaces.

Overview

IaaS systems automate the management and provisioning of compute, storage, and networking resources with the goal of simplifying resource acquisition and reducing the overhead and cost of cluster administration and ownership. To enable this, IaaS systems allocate resources as system-level virtual machines (VMs) that are linked via a virtual private network and that have access to one or more distributed service abstractions, including those for object storage, formattable file systems, and queuing. Users acquire and release these abstract representations of resources on demand via application programming interfaces (APIs), which hide the details of the underlying implementation. Each service typically has a...