Infrastructure as a service

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Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a technology infrastructure delivery platform used to deliver software application environments. Customers no longer purchase servers, software, data center space or network equipment, but instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The service is purchased on a recurring monthly basis based on capacity used. The amount of resources consumed will ideally coincide with the level of user activity on the given application being hosted and will fluctuate accordingly.

Contents

[edit] IaaS architecture

[edit] History

The original term hardware as a service (HaaS) was first coined by the economist Nicholas Carr in RoughType, Mar 2006 [1]. The term HaaS is still in popular usage with IaaS being a later reinvention of the same term with no discernible distinction.

The later term of "infrastructure as a service" or IaaS started to circulate in 2006 with firms such as Savvis [2], BlueLock [3], ZDNet [4], and Tier 3 [5]

[edit] Philosophy of IaaS

As a term, IaaS is generally associated with hosting business applications and obtaining resources such as hardware, software and facilities for a monthly fee instead of a capital purchase. Assets generally belong to the hosting provider which could be an outsourced service provider or a progressive internal IT department using IaaS as a charge back model. The infrastructure service is generally surrounded by aggressive service level agreements (SLA). Virtualization has become a chief enabler of this new service offering.

[edit] Key characteristics of infrastructure delivered by IaaS

The key characteristics of IaaS Infrastructure include:

  • Application resources such as servers, network equipment, memory, CPU, disk space, data center facilities, are provided as a monthly service
  • Infrastructure scales up and down dynamically based on application resource needs
  • Service is provided as a variable monthly cost using fixed prices per resource component
  • Multiple applications or customers may or may not co-habit on the same infrastructure resources
  • Enterprise Grade Infrastructure allows mid-size companies to benefit from the aggregate compute resource pools

[edit] See Also

[edit] References

  1. ^ [http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/here_comes_haas.php Nicholas Carr Here Comes HaaS
  2. ^ Savvis The Rise of Services-Oriented IT December 2006
  3. ^ BlueLock What is Infrastructure as a Service October 2006
  4. ^ ZDNet Infrastructure as a Service October 2006
  5. ^ Tier 3 IaaS Extend and Centralize