Iaas is also known as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It is one of the layers of the cloud computing platform. It allows customers to outsource their IT infrastructures such as servers, networking, processing, storage, virtual machines, and other resources. Customers access these resources on the Internet using a pay-as-per use model.
In traditional hosting services, IT infrastructure was rented out for a specific period of time, with pre-determined hardware configuration. The client paid for the configuration and time, regardless of the actual use. With the help of the IaaS cloud computing platform layer, clients can dynamically scale the configuration to meet changing requirements and are billed only for the services actually used.
IaaS cloud computing platform layer eliminates the need for every organization to maintain the IT infrastructure.
IaaS is offered in three models: public, private, and hybrid cloud. The private cloud implies that the infrastructure resides at the customer-premise. In the case of public cloud, it is located at the cloud computing platform vendor's data center, and the hybrid cloud is a combination of the two in which the customer selects the best of both public cloud or private cloud.
