Defining Cloud Computing: Part 6 – IaaS
Infrastructure as a Service
Amazon AWS is the largest of all the IaaS providers. Where SaaS offers a complete application as service and PaaS offers the ability to develop an application, IaaS doesn’t care about the application at all. IaaS provides the underlying hardware and operating system resources to do anything you want. IaaS has also been referred to as Everything as a Service.
IaaS offers CPU, memory, storage, networking and security as a package. IaaS is the virtual machine in the sky. In general, with IaaS, you choose from a range of operating systems (usually some flavor of open source), a size for your hardware (number of CPUs and CPU power) and an amount of storage.
There are a number of successful IaaS providers: Amazon, Joyent, GoGrid and FlexiScale.
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