Infrastructure as a Service

The growth of cloud computing has opened up new models of delivering IT infrastructure.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) plays a key role in this shift, offering more options for organizations to meet evolving demands.

What Is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)?

IaaS is a cloud computing service that provides IT resources such as servers, storage, and networking from third-party providers over the internet. With IaaS, capacity is elastic and available on demand. Teams provision infrastructure depending on their workloads, without forecasting hardware in advance.

In this model, the vendor manages the infrastructure that organizations need to build and deploy software quickly. In turn, organizations are responsible for maintaining control over their applications, data, and operating systems.

How Does IaaS Work?

In an IaaS setup, cloud providers maintain large-scale data centers filled with physical hardware. A virtualization layer (hypervisor) abstracts the physical resources to create multiple isolated virtual machines (VMs) that customers can use when they create their own servers.

Users request and configure resources through a web portal or API. They define an isolated virtual network, attach compute and storage to it, and then expose the required endpoints.

Core Components

The core components include the following:

Compute

Cloud providers deliver the compute resources needed to run workloads. This includes CPUs, GPUs, RAM, and high-performance units for HPC.

Users access these resources in the form of cloud instances or virtual machines. The VMs act as virtual servers where you can run workloads without managing the physical hardware.

Storage

IaaS platforms provide secure and scalable storage for metadata and files. The common storage options are:

• File storage for shared file systems.

• Object storage for media data and big data sets.

• Block storage for high-speed transactional workloads.

Networking

The networking layer enables communication between users and services. It allows users to easily access the VMs.

These resources are provided through software-defined networks virtualized on the platform's infrastructure. Users can configure their own isolated virtual networks by defining custom rules, IP ranges, subnets, and more.

Payment Models and Additional Costs

Providers charge you for the resources you consume. Although the specifics vary by vendor, most offer the two following models:

Pay-Per-Use

Pricing is primarily pay-as-you-go, where you pay for only what you use. Compute is metered per second, minute, or hour, while storage is billed per GB-month (plus data transfer costs).

This model is highly flexible and has no upfront costs. However, it can lead to an unexpected billing surge if usage increases, such as when your dating app experiences more signups around Valentine's Day.

Subscription

Some vendors offer discounts to users with long-term commitments. This allows them to offer more favorable pricing to users. For example, a user can reserve an instance for one or three years at a highly discounted rate.

Subscriptions provide more predictability, with the option to exceed capacity at on-demand rates.

Additional Costs

Users may experience extra charges, like data egress fees when migrating to another provider. You may also see additional fees for cross-region traffic, NAT gateways, snapshots, and more.

Security

Security is a shared responsibility between the provider and the customer.

The provider must secure the underlying infrastructure, which includes the physical data center, virtualization layer, and cloud management software.

The customer is in charge of securing their applications, data, and user access. This involves secure coding, correct network configuration, OS updates, identity and access management (IAM), credential management, and monitoring.

Most incidents appear as a result of misconfigurations, which is why secure teams monitor continuously and treat policy as code.

IaaS vs. SaaS vs. PaaS

IaaS is one of three primary cloud computing models, alongside Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). The main difference comes from the IT stack managed by the provider versus the customer. Here is a brief comparison:

IaaS 

As mentioned above, the cloud platform delivers the network, storage, and compute resources, with the hypervisor abstracting the physical layer. Users configure VMs and software environments and secure their workloads.

Two popular examples are Amazon EC2 and S3 on AWS.

PaaS 

Unlike IaaS, PaaS delivers a more complete platform that includes the infrastructure and runtime environment. It's a fully managed solution, and developers don't need to customize the underlying infrastructure.

PaaS platforms help developers run and manage applications without the complexity of maintaining the platform.

Some examples of PaaS include AWS Lambda, Heroku, and Google App Engine.

SaaS

This is application software fully developed and hosted on a cloud platform. End users can access the application over the internet via a web browser or install it on their mobile device or computer. The software runs under the hood and is fully hands-off for the user.

Familiar SaaS products include Dropbox, ClickUp, Slack, and QuickBooks.

Benefits of IaaS

Below are some of the main benefits this model offers:

Reduces Costs 

Traditionally, a company's infrastructure would be capital expenditure (CapEx), requiring them to make large upfront investments to purchase and continuously pay for maintenance and upgrades.

Provisioning infrastructure from a cloud vendor is an operational expense (OpEx), allowing you to cut out CapEx costs entirely and only pay for the resources you use.

It drastically reduces starting costs and, for most organizations, is the cheaper option over time, even as your application scales. It's one of the main factors that has let startups with limited funding compete with established tech giants. 

Faster Time to Market

Spinning up a production environment is extremely fast. The team doesn't spend weeks installing resources, which is common in traditional IT environments.

Development teams acquire servers with a few clicks, which speeds up deployment cycles. This agility gives businesses a competitive edge, allowing them to respond faster to their clients' needs.

Easier To Scale 

These platforms are highly scalable, making them suitable for applications with usage spikes or those that anticipate rapid growth. For example, when your online marketplace experiences a sudden traffic burst, you can add more VM instances to handle the load and reduce them when it returns to normal.

Better Disaster Recovery and Higher Uptime

Cloud vendors allow developers to replicate critical hardware systems and data. If the primary server fails, another virtual machine in a different region can take over to provide continuity and minimize downtime.

Most platforms can deliver automatic backup and replication, reducing manual processes during recovery. It also ensures service providers meet service-level agreements.

Improved Security

As mentioned before, providers are in charge of infrastructure security, reducing some of the burden for their customers.

The customer's role is configuring the environment to safeguard their workloads. Many vendors simplify this task by offering helpful tools and services, like Amazon CloudWatch and CloudTrail for monitoring and auditing in AWS.

For instance, if a telehealth app has poorly configured security settings, a service can detect unusual activity and alert the developers to prevent or minimize personal health information leaks.

When Should You Use IaaS?

This model is versatile and has several use cases, including:

Data Analytics and Machine Learning 

These platforms provide the right amount of resources to run big data analytics and machine learning models, which need massive compute power and storage.

When training a machine learning model, you can provision the necessary high-performance and scalable GPUs and RAM. For example, if you have a large Apache Spark cluster to analyze a large data set, you can run ephemeral GPU clusters and tear them down after jobs complete to control cost.

You can also choose specialized instance types ideal for a specific task, such as GPU-powered VMs.

Software Development and Testing

This model provides a sandbox environment for software development and QA teams, enabling them to provision testing and staging environments in the cloud. Each project gets unique databases, OS versions, and dependencies.

DevOps teams can also spin up VMs for CI/CD pipelines to accelerate SDLC.

Teams can experiment freely, as the infrastructure adjusts to meet their workload demands.

Web and Mobile Application Hosting 

Whether running an enterprise SaaS application, mobile app backend, AI agent, or a simple website, this model provides the resources you need to deploy the app and serve users.

The application can run on multiple instances across availability zones, with load balancers distributing traffic. Bursty apps benefit from auto-scaling policies to smooth traffic surges.

High-Performance Computing

IaaS is suitable for tasks that involve complex computations or simulations. It gives you the tools to orchestrate HPC workloads and run massive computations without investing in permanent hardware.

With a large number of processors working in parallel, you can handle tasks such as fluid computations, weather forecasting, and financial risk modeling.

Best Practices for Implementing IaaS

Here are the best practices to follow when adopting this model:

Monitor Usage and Costs

Costs can become difficult to track, especially when your architecture scales horizontally or utilizes numerous services across regions. Enforce the necessary cost allocation tags and anomaly alerts to keep spending predictable.

Use native cloud cost tools like the AWS Cost Explorer, Google Cloud Billing, or Azure Cost Management to set up budgets and visualize spending.

Also, be mindful of how application logic impacts your costs. Poor coding patterns can significantly increase costs, such as unoptimized API calls or recursive functions that make API calls.

Assess Infrastructure Needs Before Choosing a Provider

Before settling on a platform, evaluate specific workload requirements and look at the top competitors on the market. Each one has unique strengths, weaknesses, and cost implications.

Consider factors such as the nature of your workloads (whether GPU, CPU, or memory intensive), the amount of data to store, and performance and compliance needs.

If you plan to achieve global coverage, consider a provider with multiple regions or data centers for low-latency access.

Plan Resource Allocation and Scaling

While you have multiple options for allocating resources and scaling, use them wisely.

Configure auto-scaling to adjust resources predictably. You can set thresholds or rules that automatically launch new VM instances when CPU usage is high and shut them down when it declines.

Ensure Proper Network Configuration

Segment your network so that there are separate subnets for the web, database, and application tiers. This approach gives you strict control over each resource.

Use firewalls to filter both inbound and outbound traffic, close all ports by default, and open only what's needed. Also, you should utilize available network resources to optimize performance, like load balancers and DNS management.

Enforce Strict Security Protocols

You can implement robust IAM practices to minimize unauthorized access. Use secure authentication to verify users and role-based access controls to make sure members in your organization can only access what they need.

To protect your app and its data from threat actors, you should:

• Encrypt data at rest and in transit

• Deploy endpoint protection and malware detection tools

• Upgrade and patch your system regularly

Centralize observability for logs, metrics, and traces by using services like AWS CloudWatch or Azure Monitor. You can set up alerts for anomalies and configuration drift to help you address issues as they pop up.

Frequently Asked Questions