The most basic category of commercial cloud computing services. With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), you rent IT infrastructure – servers and virtual machines (VMs), storage, networks, operating systems – from a cloud provider.
IaaS is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the Internet. Quickly scale up and down with demand, and pay only for what you use.
IaaS helps you avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other datacenter infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate commercial service component, and you only need to rent a particular one for as long as you need it. The cloud computing service provider manages the infrastructure, while you purchase, install, configure, and manage your own software – operating systems, middleware, and applications.
