Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are online services that provide high-level APIs used to

dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical

computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. A hypervisor,
such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V, LXD,
runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system
can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down
according to customers' varying requirements.

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]

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and

managed over the internet. It’s one of the four types of cloud services, along with software as
a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and serverless.

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.