Chapter 5

Understanding Infrastructure as a Service

In This Chapter

Understanding the key characteristics of IaaS

Considering the role of private IaaS

Using Iaas

Examining Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud

What Infrastructure as a Service means to you

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the most straightforward of the four models for delivering cloud services. IaaS is the virtual delivery of computing resources in the form of hardware, networking, and storage services. It may also include the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage the resources. Rather than buying and installing the required resources in their own data center, companies are renting these required resources on an as-needed basis.

Many companies with a hybrid environment are likely to include IaaS in some form because IaaS is a highly practical solution for companies with various IT resource challenges. Whether a company needs additional resources to support a temporary development project, an on-going dedicated development testing environment, or disaster recovery, paying for infrastructure services on a per-use basis can be highly cost-effective.

In this chapter we explore the two types of IaaS services: public and private. A public cloud IaaS service is designed so consumers in any size business can acquire services in a rental model. In contrast, private IaaS services are provided inside a company’s own data center, enabling IT management to provide a self- service portal for employees and partners to easily access approved services. Although these two approaches to IaaS have their commonalities, their business models also have their differences.

Note: Although it would be great to tell you there are neat differences between a public and a private IaaS, the truth is that many offerings in the IaaS market can be used for either a public or a private cloud. A lot of what you see is the positioning of an IaaS by a vendor based on the types of businesses it wants to sell to. For example, OpenStack can be used both as a public or a private IaaS, as can Red Hat. HP’s CloudSystem offers both public and private IaaS services. Eucalyptus is intended as an IaaS for private clouds but can be leveraged as the foundation for a public cloud. Additionally, for internal end users of private clouds, the look and feel of the environment is likely very familiar to them if they have experience using public cloud IaaS services.