Due to the increase in online traffic, additional hardware resources were required, and new technologies to automate hardware management were required. Businesses started to provide infrastructure as a service, or resources and management tools for cloud-based infrastructure (IaaS). So, what is infrastructure as a service? What is IaaS in cloud computing? And is it suitable for your business? Let’s find out the answer!
Table of Contents
What is infrastructure as a service?
IaaS, or infrastructure as a service, is a type of cloud computing that offers clients basic computation, network, and storage capabilities on demand, via the internet, and on a pay-as-you-go basis. Especially in the case of “spiky” workloads, infrastructure as a service enables end users to increase and reduce resources as needed, lowering the need for expensive, upfront capital expenditures or needless “owned” infrastructure. IaaS in cloud computing offers the most fundamental level of control over cloud resources, in contrast to PaaS and SaaS (even more recent computing paradigms like serverless and containers).
The architecture and platform of IaaS
In an IaaS service model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure parts that are typically found in an on-premises data center. This covers the virtualization or hypervisor layer as well as the servers, storage, and networking hardware.
1. Physical data centers
IaaS providers will oversee sizable data centers, often located around the globe, that house the physical equipment necessary to run the multiple abstraction layers on top of them and are accessible to end users through the internet. The physical infrastructure is offered to end users as a service in the majority of infrastructure as a service models, rather than being used by them directly.
2. Compute
IaaS is sometimes referred to as virtualized compute resources. The hypervisors are managed by providers, and end users can programmatically provision virtual “instances” with desired amounts of compute and memory (and sometimes storage). Most companies offer both CPUs and GPUs for certain workloads. Cloud computing is frequently accompanied with supporting services such as auto scaling and load balancing, which provide the scalability and performance qualities that make cloud desirable in the first place.
3. Network
Cloud networking is a type of Software Defined Networking in which traditional networking hardware, such as routers and switches, is made available programmatically, generally via APIs. More complex networking use cases include the creation of multi-zone regions and virtual private clouds, which will be addressed more below.
4. Storage
Cloud storage is classified into three types: block storage, file storage, and object storage. Block and file storage are prevalent in traditional data centers, but they frequently struggle with the cloud’s scalability, performance, and dispersed properties. Object storage has thus become the most common format of storage in the cloud since it is highly dispersed (and thus resilient), uses commodity hardware, data can be accessed easily over HTTP, and scaling is not only practically limitless but also increases linearly as the cluster grows.
IaaS providers typically offer a variety of services in addition to infrastructure components. These can include extensive billing, monitoring, log access, security, load balancing, clustering, and storage resiliency features such as backup, replication, and recovery.
These services are becoming more policy-driven, allowing infrastructure as a service users to adopt higher levels of automation and orchestration for critical infrastructure operations. A user, for example, can set policies that drive load balancing in order to preserve application availability and performance.
How does infrastructure as a service work?
IaaS users connect to resources and services over a WAN, such as the internet, and can use the cloud provider’s services to install the remaining components of an application stack. For example, the user can utilize the infrastructure as a service platform to construct virtual machines (VMs), install operating systems in each VM, deploy middleware such as databases, create storage buckets for workloads and backups, and install the corporate workload onto that VM. Customers can then use the provider’s services to manage disaster recovery, track costs, monitor performance, balance network traffic, solve application difficulties, and track expenditures.
Any cloud computing model necessitates the involvement of a provider. The supplier is frequently a third-party company that specializes in selling infrastructure as a service. Independent IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A company may also choose to construct a private cloud, becoming its own provider of infrastructure services.
Pros and Cons
1. Pros
Reduces capital outlays and optimizes expenses
IaaS reduces the cost of configuring and administering a physical datacenter, making it a cost-effective option for cloud migration. IaaS providers’ pay-as-you-go subscription models help you decrease hardware expenditures and upkeep while allowing your IT personnel to focus on essential business.
Larger and more efficient IT workloads
IaaS lets you scale globally and accommodate spikes in resource demand. That way, you can deliver IT resources to employees from anywhere in the world faster and enhance application performance.
Increases stability, reliability, and supportability
The worldwide scalability of infrastructure as a service in cloud computing enables you to respond to fluctuations in resource demand. By doing so, you may improve application performance and distribute IT resources to staff members worldwide more quickly.
Increases disaster recovery and business continuity
It costs money to achieve high availability, business continuity, and disaster recovery because these things need a lot of staff and technology. But infrastructure as a service can help to lower this cost if the proper SLA is in place. Additionally, it enables normal access to apps and data in the event of a catastrophe or outage.
Improves security
A cloud service provider can provide better protection for your applications and data than you could internally with the right service agreement.
Aids innovation and accelerates the distribution of new applications to users
IaaS allows you to launch a new product or initiative faster than days or weeks by allowing the required computer infrastructure to be ready in a matter of minutes or hours. Additionally, infrastructure as a service enables quicker app delivery to users since you don’t need to build up the supporting infrastructure.
2. Cons
IaaS billing, despite its adaptable, pay-as-you-go structure, can be problematic for some firms. Extremely detailed cloud billing that is segmented to represent the specific consumption of services. Users frequently face sticker shock when evaluating the invoices for all of the resources and services used in the deployment of an application, or discover that expenses are higher than anticipated. In order to understand how cloud infrastructure as a service is being utilized and to prevent being paid for services that are not authorized, users should carefully monitor their IaaS setups and invoices.
Another frequent issue for infrastructure as a service user is insight. Since infrastructure as a service provider owns the infrastructure, IaaS users rarely have access to information about the configuration and performance of that infrastructure. The management and monitoring of systems may be more challenging due to this lack of transparency.
Service resiliency is another issue that worries infrastructure as a service user. The supplier has a significant impact on the performance and availability of the workload. The workloads of the users would be impacted if an IaaS provider encounters network constraints or any other kind of internal or external disruption. The loud neighbor problem can also have a negative effect on users’ workloads because infrastructure as a service has a multi-tenant architecture.
IaaS, SaaS and PaaS in comparison
Understanding which components of the stack are controlled by the vendor and which are managed by the end user is often the simplest and most popular method to comprehend the distinction between the coarse-grained -aaS categories of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.
In a conventional IT environment, the end user is responsible for managing the entire stack from physical hardware for servers and networking up to virtualization, operating systems, middleware, and other components.
After that, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS each offer a higher level of abstraction. The physical computing, networking, storage, and technology required to virtualize those resources are abstracted away by infrastructure as a service. PaaS goes a step farther and abstracts away runtime, middleware, and operating system management. The management of everything but the application code itself is abstracted away by serverless computing (see below), and the entire stack is abstracted away by SaaS by providing the entire end-user application as-a-Service.
IaaS vs. Containers vs. Serverless
In more recent times, containers and serverless have taken center stage in discussions about cloud workloads. IaaS was, in many respects, a step toward the platonic ideal of the cloud.
IaaS does give customers far greater flexibility in how they pay for what they consume, although this is rarely the case. Even virtual servers frequently have capacity utilization issues and long-running operations.
Although infrastructure as a service abstracts away a lot of low-level components, end users are still responsible for managing operating systems, middleware, and runtimes. This allows developers to concentrate on business logic that distinguishes the business.
Although infrastructure as a service is frequently more resource and cost effective than traditional computation, starting up a VM can still take some time, and each VM comes with its own set of operating system overhead.
From a workload standpoint, this IT infrastructure was able to support nearly anything, but there was space for improvement when it came to the fundamental ideas and principles that define cloud computing.
The conventional infrastructure as a service paradigm is under pressure from the two more recent cloud models of containers and serverless in some specific categories of cloud native workloads.
With orchestration technologies like Kubernetes controlling the entire ecosystem of clusters, containers have in some cases started to take the place of virtual machines as the basic deployment unit for processes or services.
Serverless goes the farthest of any paradigm, abstracting away almost everything but the business logic, scaling precisely with demand, and genuinely delivering on the promise of paying only for what you need.
Containers and serverless architectures will spread as the world goes further toward microservices designs, in which programs are broken down into smaller functional units, deployed independently, manage their own data, and communicate via API.
The serverless and container technologies will be ones to watch and start using opportunistically where it makes sense. Right now, standard cloud computing infrastructure as a service is by far the most developed computer model in the cloud and controls the vast majority of market share.
Best practices of infrastructure as a service
IaaS is suitable for a wide range of uses. It provides compute resources through a cloud concept that may be applied to different use cases. The following are some of the most typical use cases for infrastructure as a service deployments:
- Environments for testing and development. IaaS gives businesses flexibility when it comes to selecting multiple test and development environments. They are simple to scale up or down to meet requirements.
- Hosting websites with a focus on consumers. Compared to more conventional methods, this can lower the cost of hosting a website.
- Storing, backing up, and recovering data. In situations where demand is erratic or might continuously rise, IaaS may be the simplest and most effective method for enterprises to handle data. Additionally, enterprises can avoid having to expend significant resources on managing, complying with, and meeting the legal and regulatory requirements for data storage.
- Web applications. IaaS provides the infrastructure required to host web applications. Therefore, infrastructure as a service in cloud can offer the required storage capacity, servers, and networking if a business is hosting a web application. The cloud architecture can be readily scaled up or down depending on the demand of the application, and deployments may be completed rapidly.
- High-performance computing (HPC). Scientific calculations, financial modeling, and product design tasks are a few workloads that may require HPC-level processing
- Analytics using big data and data warehousing. IaaS can offer the necessary processing and compute resources to sift through large data collections.
How to implement IaaS?
There are significant factors to take into account when attempting to establish an infrastructure as a service product. Before different technological requirements and providers should be taken into account, the infrastructure as a service use cases and infrastructure requirements should be precisely established. When deploying infrastructure as a service, the following technical and storage requirements should be taken into account:
- Networking. Organizations must focus on cloud deployments and ask specific questions to ensure that the deployed infrastructure in the cloud can be accessed effectively.
- Storage. Organizations should think about the types of storage that are needed, the performance levels needed, the future need for additional capacity, provisioning, and prospective solutions like object storage.
- Compute. Organizations should think about the effects of the various server, VM, CPU, and RAM options that cloud providers may give.
- Security. When assessing cloud services and providers, data security should come first and foremost. It is important to explore details on data encryption, certifications, compliance and regulation, and safe workloads.
- Catastrophe recovery. Another important value area for enterprises in the event of failover on the VM, server, or site levels is disaster recovery tools and alternatives.
- Server Size. Options for server and VM sizes, the number of CPUs that can be installed on servers, and additional CPU and RAM information.
- Speed of the network. VM, data center, storage, and internet speed.
- Manageability in general. How many infrastructure as a service features can the user control, which components must be controlled, and how simple is it to administer these features?
Organizations should pay special attention to how different providers’ technical and service offerings meet business goals as well as their own unique usage requirements when implementing new systems. It is important to thoroughly assess the market for infrastructure as a service vendor because there is a wide range of capabilities among goods and some may better suit business demands than others.
After choosing a vendor and a product, it’s crucial to bargain all service-level agreements. Your organization will be less likely to be severely impacted by fine-print details that were previously unknown with careful discussion with the vendor.
A company should also carefully evaluate the skills of its IT staff to see how prepared it is to handle the continuous demands of infrastructure as a service installation. In-house developers are in charge of the technical upkeep of the infrastructure in the infrastructure as a service model, including software patches, upgrades, and troubleshooting. To make sure that the organization is prepared to maximize value from an infrastructure as a service installation on all fronts, a personnel assessment is required.
In short, infrastructure as a service was developed as a result of historically improving hardware management and system administration. It provides access to infrastructure technology resources for businesses of all sizes without having to purchase, maintain, and manage an on-premise infrastructure. This has facilitated innovation and given even the tiniest startup access to infrastructure at the enterprise level.
