Infrastructure as a service

Category of cloud computing Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model where a cloud services vendor provides computing resources such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which emulates computer hardware). This service frees users from maintaining their own data center, but they must install and maintain the operating system and application software. IaaS provides users with high-level APIs to control details of the underlying network infrastructure, such as backup, data partitioning, scaling, security, and physical computing resources. Services can be scaled on-demand by the user. According to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), such infrastructure is the most basic cloud-service model. IaaS can be hosted in a public cloud (where users share hardware, storage, and network devices), a private cloud (users do not share resources), or a hybrid cloud (combination of both). Overview The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines infrastructure as a service as: The capability provided to the consumer is provision processing, storage, networks, as well as other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is abl