Glossary of terms
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that delivers fundamental compute, network, and storage resources to consumers on-demand, over the internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis.
IaaS is made up of a collection of physical and virtualized resources that provide consumers with the basic building blocks needed to run applications and workloads in the cloud. IaaS enables end users to scale and shrink resources on an as-needed basis, reducing the need for high, up-front capital expenditures or unnecessary “owned” infrastructure, especially in the case of “spiky” workloads.
In contrast to PaaS and SaaS (even newer computing models like containers and serverless), IaaS provides the lowest-level control of resources in the cloud.
IaaS provider provides the following services: Compute: IaaS is typically understood as virtualized compute resources, so for the purposes of this article, we will define IaaS compute as a virtual machine. Providers manage the hypervisors and end users can then programmatically provision virtual “instances” with desired amounts of compute and memory (and sometimes storage)..
Cloud compute also typically comes paired with supporting services like auto scaling and load balancing that provide the scale and performance characteristics that make cloud desirable in the first place.Storage: The three primary types of cloud storage are block storage, file storage, and object storage. Block and file storage are common in traditional data centers but can often struggle with scale, performance and distributed characteristics of cloud. Thus, of the three, object storage has thus become the most common mode of storage in the cloud given that it is highly distributed (and thus resilient), it leverages commodity hardware, data can be accessed easily over HTTP, and scale is not only essentially limitless but performance scales linearly as the cluster grows. Network: Networking in the cloud is a form of Software Defined Networking in which traditional networking hardware, such as routers and switches, are made available programmatically, typically through APIs.
More advanced networking use cases involve the construction of multi-zone regions and virtual private clouds, both of which will be discussed in more detail later.
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