Infrastructure as a service

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Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which mostly refers, in this case, to emulating computer hardware). This service enables users to free themselves from maintaining an on-premises data center. [1] The IaaS provider is hosting these resources in either the public cloud (meaning users share the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other users), the private cloud (meaning users do not share these resources), or the hybrid cloud (combination of both). [2]

Contents

It provides the customer with high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like backup, data partitioning, scaling, security, physical computing resources, etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines as well as 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 OpenStack, Apache CloudStack or OpenNebula. It manages the creation of a virtual machine and decides on the hypervisor (i.e. physical host) in order to start it whilst enabling VM migration features between hosts, allocates storage volumes, and attaches them to VMs that track usage information for billing and more.

An alternative to hypervisors is 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.

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. [3]

The NIST's definition of cloud computing defines infrastructure as a service like: [4]

The capability provided to the consumer is provision processing, storage, networks, as well as other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy & run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, & deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

According to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the most basic cloud-service model offered by the providers is IT infrastructure – virtual machines and other resources – as a service to subscribers.

IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from the large pools of equipment installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and the application software on the cloud infrastructure. [5] [ unreliable source? ] In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems along with application software. Cloud providers typically bill IaaS services on a utility computing basis: cost reflects the number of resources allocated and consumed.

See also

Related Research Articles

Utility computing, or computer utility, is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing, the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs. Utility is the packaging of system resources, such as computation, storage and services, as a metered service. This model has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire computer resources; instead, resources are essentially rented.

A virtual appliance is a pre-configured virtual machine image, ready to run on a hypervisor; virtual appliances are a subset of the broader class of software appliances. Installation of a software appliance on a virtual machine and packaging that into an image creates a virtual appliance. Like software appliances, virtual appliances are intended to eliminate the installation, configuration and maintenance costs associated with running complex stacks of software.

Desktop virtualization is a software technology that separates the desktop environment and associated application software from the physical client device that is used to access it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer appliance</span> Dedicated computer system

A computer appliance is a computer system with a combination of hardware, software, or firmware that is specifically designed to provide a particular computing resource. Such devices became known as appliances because of the similarity in role or management to a home appliance, which are generally closed and sealed, and are not serviceable by the user or owner. The hardware and software are delivered as an integrated product and may even be pre-configured before delivery to a customer, to provide a turn-key solution for a particular application. Unlike general purpose computers, appliances are generally not designed to allow the customers to change the software and the underlying operating system, or to flexibly reconfigure the hardware.

In computing, network virtualization is the process of combining hardware and software network resources and network functionality into a single, software-based administrative entity, a virtual network. Network virtualization involves platform virtualization, often combined with resource virtualization.

Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing platform and one or more applications, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching the application(s), and to allow developers to create, develop, and package such software bundles.

In computing, virtualization or virtualisation is the act of creating a virtual version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared Internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenStack</span> Cloud computing software

OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software platform consists of interrelated components that control diverse, multi-vendor hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center. Users manage it either through a web-based dashboard, through command-line tools, or through RESTful web services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenNebula</span> Cloud-computing platform for managing heterogeneous distributed infrastructure

OpenNebula is an open source cloud computing platform for managing heterogeneous data center, public cloud and edge computing infrastructure resources. OpenNebula manages on-premise and remote virtual infrastructure to build private, public, or hybrid implementations of Infrastructure as a Service and multi-tenant Kubernetes deployments. The two primary uses of the OpenNebula platform are data center virtualization and cloud deployments based on the KVM hypervisor, LXD/LXC system containers, and AWS Firecracker microVMs. The platform is also capable of offering the cloud infrastructure necessary to operate a cloud on top of existing VMware infrastructure. In early June 2020, OpenNebula announced the release of a new Enterprise Edition for corporate users, along with a Community Edition. OpenNebula CE is free and open-source software, released under the Apache License version 2. OpenNebula CE comes with free access to patch releases containing critical bug fixes but with no access to the regular EE maintenance releases. Upgrades to the latest minor/major version is only available for CE users with non-commercial deployments or with significant open source contributions to the OpenNebula Community. OpenNebula EE is distributed under a closed-source license and requires a commercial Subscription.

Nimbula was a computer software company that existed from 2008 to 2017. It developed software for the implementation of public and private cloud computing environments.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enables users to launch virtual machines (VMs) on demand. VMs can be launched from the standard images or custom images created by users. GCE users must authenticate based on OAuth 2.0 before launching the VMs. Google Compute Engine can be accessed via the Developer Console, RESTful API or command-line interface (CLI).

HP CloudSystem is a cloud infrastructure from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) that combines storage, servers, networking and software.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HP Cloud</span> Set of cloud computing services

HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard that offered public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed private cloud and other cloud services. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unit and HP Cloud Services, an OpenStack-based public cloud. It was marketed to enterprise organizations to combine public cloud services with internal IT resources to create hybrid clouds, or a mix of private and public cloud environments, from around 2011 until 2016.

OrionVM Wholesale Pty Limited is an Australian infrastructure as a service provider and white-label cloud platform. Resellers present customers with a rebranded interface for deploying virtual machine instances, which are only billed for what their customers use. Cloud Harmony benchmarked the OrionVM Cloud Platform's InfiniBand-backed network storage as the world's fastest in 2011.

Cloud computing has become a social phenomenon used by most people every day. As with every important social phenomenon there are issues that limit its widespread adoption. In the present scenario, cloud computing is seen as a fast developing area that can instantly supply extensible services by using internet with the help of hardware and software virtualization. The biggest advantage of cloud computing is flexible lease and release of resources as per the requirement of the user. Other benefits encompass betterment in efficiency, compensating the costs in operations and management. It curtails down the high prices of hardware and software

In computer networking, a bare-metal server is a physical computer server that is used by one consumer, or tenant, only. Each server offered for rental is a distinct physical piece of hardware that is a functional server on its own. They are not virtual servers running in multiple pieces of shared hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oracle Cloud</span> Cloud computing service

Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.

References

  1. ↑ "What is IaaS?". www.redhat.com. Retrieved 2022-10-21.
  2. ↑ "What Is IaaS? Infrastructure as a Service". Oracle.
  3. ↑ Alex Amies; Harm Sluiman; Qiang Guo Tong; Guo Ning Liu (2 July 2012). Developing and Hosting Applications on the Cloud: Develop Hosting Applica Cloud. Pearson Education. ISBN   978-0-13-306685-2.
  4. ↑ Peter Mell; Timothy Grance (September 2011). The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (Technical report). National Institute of Standards and Technology: U.S. Department of Commerce. doi:10.6028/NIST.SP.800-145. Special publication 800-145.
  5. ↑ Ananich, Anthony (February 20, 2016). "What is IaaS?". ananich.pro. Archived from the original on March 2, 2016. Retrieved 2016-02-20.
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