Also known as: IaaS
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model in which the provider rents out raw compute, storage, and networking — usually as virtual machines — and you manage everything above the bare hardware.1
Overview
With IaaS the provider owns the data center, the physical servers, and the virtualization layer; you receive a virtual machine and are responsible for the operating system, patching, services, and your application. It is the most flexible cloud tier and the closest to running your own server, billed on demand by the hour or second. A virtual private server is essentially a small, fixed slice of IaaS.
Where it fits
IaaS is the bottom rung of the cloud stack, beneath platform as a service (which also runs the OS and runtime) and software as a service (a finished application). Choose IaaS when you need full control of the environment but not physical hardware; choose a bare-metal server when virtualization overhead or multi-tenancy is unacceptable. A GopherTrunk back end fits IaaS well for storage and serving, though capture still lives at the antenna.
Sources
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Infrastructure as a service — Wikipedia, on the IaaS cloud model. ↩