Cloud & DevOps
IaaS is a cloud service model that delivers virtualised computing resources — servers, storage, and networking — on demand over the internet, billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
With IaaS, organisations rent raw infrastructure from providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud instead of purchasing and maintaining physical hardware in a data centre. Teams retain full control over operating systems, middleware, runtimes, and application code, which makes IaaS suitable for workloads with specific OS configurations or compliance requirements. The elastic nature of IaaS allows businesses to scale compute and storage capacity up or down in minutes, eliminating the need to over-provision hardware for peak loads. IaaS underpins most modern cloud architectures and is commonly combined with PaaS and SaaS services within the same cloud account.
Example
An e-commerce company runs its database and application servers on AWS EC2 instances (IaaS), scaling from 10 to 500 instances automatically during a flash sale.
Related terms
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
PaaS is a cloud service model that provides a managed platform — including runtime environments, middleware, databases, and deployment pipelines — so developers can build and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.
SaaS (Software as a Service)
SaaS is a cloud delivery model in which software is hosted by a provider and accessed by users over the internet via a browser or thin client, with no local installation required.
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services — including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and analytics — over the internet, enabling on-demand access, rapid scaling, and pay-per-use pricing.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances to prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck, improving application availability, throughput, and fault tolerance.
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