Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the foundation of cloud computing. Rather than purchasing or leasing space in an expensive data center, labor, real estate, and all of the utilities to maintain and deploy computer servers, cloud networks and storage, Cloud buyers rent space in a virtual data center from an IaaS provider. In simple words, you are renting the hardware and the provisioning software that operates it. You have access to the virtual data center via the Internet. This type of cloud computing provides the “raw materials” for IT, and you usually only pay for the resources you consume, including (but not limited to) CPU cores, RAM, hard disk or storage space, etc.
No investment in hardware: the underlying physical hardware that supports an IaaS service is set up and maintained by the cloud provider, saving the time and cost of doing so on the client side.
Location independence: the service can usually be accessed from any location as long as there is an internet connection and the security protocol of the cloud allows it.
Physical security of data center locations: services provided, benefit from the physical security afforded to the servers which are hosted within a data center.
No single point of failure: For many services if one entire data center were to go offline, nevermind one server, the IaaS service could still run successfully due to the remaining multitude of hardware resources.
Let us consider a scenario where you are going on vacation (lucky you!!) and you want to travel around. Here we will see, how rental cars are like cloud computing.
Cheap - It is always cheap to rent a car when you go on vacation, than buying a car.
Broad Access Network - For instance, you can rent a vehicle from anywhere. Similarly in cloud computing, we can access the computing resources when and where we need them.
Rapid Elasticity - Grow and shrink as per the requirement. You can rent as many vehicles you require from any rental shop. Similarly, the computers might be of different models or have different sizes of hardware, but when you group them all together into a resource pool, you ensure you have enough power to go around.
Pay as you go - When you travel to these various cities, obviously it doesn’t make sense to buy a car in each one of them. You don’t need the car all the time, so you don’t want to own it all the time. When you have these temporary needs, you rent a car for the location and time that you need it, without being required to buy and maintain it permanently. In a typical cloud computing environment, it works the same way. You only pay for what you need, when you require it.
On demand self-service - Before we go on a trip, you never actually call and talk to a person at the rental car company to reserve a rental car. All of the rental car companies have websites designed for you to enter the type of car you need, where you want to pick it up, and for what time period you want to use the car. This same self-service method is applied for cloud computing. You can log into the provider websites to request the specific computer resources that you need.