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Infrastruct
Infrastruct
Overview
Typically IaaS involves the use of a cloud orchestration technology like Open Stack, Apache
Cloudstack or Open Nebula. This manages the creation of a virtual machine and decides on
which hypervisor (i.e. physical host) to start it, enables VM migration features between hosts,
allocates storage volumes and attaches them to VMs, usage information for billing and lots
more.
An alternative to hypervisors are Linux containers, which run in isolated partitions of a single
Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are
the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers.
Containerisation offers higher performance than virtualization, because there is no hypervisor
overhead. Also, container capacity auto-scales dynamically with computing load, which
eliminates the problem of over-provisioning and enables usage-based billing.[1]
IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw
block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area
networks (VLANs), and software bundles.[2]
IaaS quickly scales up and down with demand, letting you pay only for what you use. It helps
you avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and
other datacenter infrastructure. Each resource is offered as a separate service component, and
you only need to rent a particular one for as long as you need it. A cloud computing service
provider, such as Azure, manages the infrastructure, while you purchase, install, configure,
and manage your own software—operating systems, middleware, and applications.