Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in Cloud Computing

As organizations grapple with the effects of a challenging economy, greater competition through globalization, and the need to scale their resources lightning-fast to keep pace with tech innovations, it's not surprising that infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is experiencing unprecedented growth. The IaaS market is valued at $67.42 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $562.53 billion by 2031. This equates to an anticipated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.50% from 2024 to 2031!

Read on to learn more about IaaS, how it works, the IaaS architecture, IaaS use cases, and key considerations when selecting the right IaaS solutions for your organization.

Cloud computing overview

The term cloud computing refers to a virtual environment where the resources needed to build applications are accessed over a network via the internet.

Basic components of IaaS, namely, compute, network and storage

Organizations can build their own private cloud or they can access a public cloud via cloud computing services providers, which offer a variety of service models to choose from.

The fundamental layers of the cloud service models, namely, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Common cloud computing services

Three common cloud service models include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS), as illustrated in the diagram above.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

The most basic cloud computing services model offered by a cloud service provider is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud management that provides online access to virtualized computing resources, meaning that traditional underlying infrastructure such as computers, servers, etc. are hosted in the cloud rather than physically onsite with the user.

Platform as a service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model where (in addition to the benefits of IaaS) the client has access to the cloud-hosted resources and development tools needed to develop, run, and maintain cloud-enabled enterprise applications.

Software as a service (SaaS)

Software as a service (SaaS) is a cloud computing model where third-party organizations (e.g., Microsoft, Salesforce, EA Games) deploy their applications in the cloud and sell access to their applications using a browser or the program interface (e.g., Microsoft Office licenses, Food Network GO cooking classes).

Learn more about the differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

What is infrastructure as a service (IaaS)?

All the physical resources or hardware—like laptops, desktops, cables, switches, routers, data centers, and storage devices—are a part of infrastructure. In cloud computing, all the infrastructure is virtualized and accessed by the user through a cloud service provider. In addition, IaaS providers also offer users a wide range of features, including log access, security, load balancing, clustering, billing, tracking, backup, replication, and restoration capabilities.

Basic components of IaaS, namely, compute, network and storage

How does IaaS work?

In an IaaS environment, IaaS providers act as a host for underlying infrastructure resources needed by the user (typically system administrators), including:

• On-demand services: Users can select the type and number of networking resources, computing resources, storage resources, and associated data center infrastructure needed, scaling up or down as traffic requires.

• Maintain resources: IaaS providers are responsible for the maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting of all contracted networking resources, computing resources, etc., freeing users from the additional cost or responsibility of maintaining their own infrastructure.

• Provide secure access: IaaS providers ensure maintenance-free, virtualized access to the hardware and cloud infrastructure resources (mentioned above) and maintaining all associated cybersecurity protocols.

Virtualization

The process of virtualization is key to the provision of IaaS services. Specifically, virtualization is a process where software is used to create an abstraction layer, decoupling the operating system from the physical hardware platform and applications that run on it. This enables the creation of virtual resources such as virtual servers, desktops, files, storage, and networks. The access is via cloud services providers, where they manage the cloud computing infrastructure.

Virtualization enables the use of multiple operating systems that can run on a single virtual machine. In the illustration below, a non-virtualized computer (left) is only able to support one operating system, while the virtualized computer (due to the abstraction layer) can support multiple operating systems across multiple virtual machines. In the virtualization process, the term abstraction layer refers to the software layer that separates the physical hardware from the virtual machines (VMs) or virtual environments running on that hardware.

Hypervisors

A hypervisor is a software product that shares one physical resource with multiple virtual machines. Cloud providers use network protocols such as iSCSI, NFS, and fiber channels to split physical networks into logical partitions (or views). For example, the hypervisor can provide networking as a service (NaaS) to the virtual machines using routing, bridging, or network address translation. Some popular hypervisors include Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware.

IaaS architecture

IaaS primarily consists of networking resources, storage, servers, and the virtualization layers of the cloud infrastructure. This enables the communication between the virtualization, storage, compute components, and other service layers, as illustrated below.

_Basic architecture of IaaS with the fundamental components, i.e. storage, compute, network, virtualization_

All the physical resources are virtualized using a hypervisor before they can be accessed by the cloud consumer (subscriber). Consumers can access the infrastructure from anywhere using an internet connection or a virtual private network (VPN) for additional security.

Basic IaaS components

• Network: Networks consist of such elements as bridges, gateways, routers, and switches that are virtualized for the cloud consumers' use.

• Storage: The most common types of cloud storage include:

  • Object storage: An inexpensive way to store any type of unstructured data including images, documents, blobs, and binary data.

• Block storage: Splits data into blocks, allowing it to be distributed across various platforms.

• File storage: A storage method geared toward organized, hierarchical data.

• Compute: There are several layers of compute components in IaaS.

  • Central processing units (CPU): These compute resources enable processing web requests and running applications.
  • Graphical processing units
    (GPU): These compute resources handle workloads like training algorithms and embedded systems.
  • High-performance units: These compute resources perform advanced, complex calculations for science and engineering workloads.

Additional IaaS options

Depending on organizational needs, cloud providers can also offer additional tools and software to enable enhanced security, load balancing, monitoring, clustering, log access, backup and recovery, replication, and serverless architecture offerings. These options provide organizations with the desired level of control and automation without the significant investment of developing and installing it themselves. As illustrated below, cloud provider virtual machines enable organizations to install their choice of operating system, software, database, and other components while taking advantage of provider tools.

Example IaaS architecture with basic components and additional offerings

In the IaaS architecture example above, the system administrator manages the virtualized storage resources and the compute resources. VM automation helps reduce the time needed for logical infrastructure maintenance and load balancing enables better performance and higher availability. Meanwhile, a firewall provides the necessary security as clients access the application.

How do you implement IaaS?

Instead of using a physical data center or hardware, IaaS providers offer these services on demand and can be implemented on public, private, and hybrid cloud models.

Types of cloud models

• Public cloud: In the public model, customer workloads run through provider-owned data centers using infrastructure that is pooled across multiple organizations. Public cloud providers offer IaaS system access through dedicated internet connections and take care of the virtualization software. Providers may also offer access to physical resources (not virtualized) as requested by the organizations.

• Private cloud: In the private model, the infrastructure utilized (e.g., data centers, virtualized machines, etc.) is available to only one organization instead of being spread across several organizations. This model includes internally developed cloud environments wholly-owned by an organization, and IaaS provider resources restricted to one organization exclusively.

• Hybrid cloud: In the hybrid cloud model, elements of both private and public clouds are combined. This allows organizations to take advantage of the benefits of IaaS while remaining in compliance with specific regulatory or security protocols. For example, organizations may want full control of their data centers due to high security or regulatory parameters, but they may still want to take advantage of the other benefits IaaS can offer.

Learn more about the difference between private cloud vs public cloud vs hybrid cloud?.

IaaS use case examples

IaaS deployments support a variety of use cases:

• Advanced workloads: Complex workloads such as scientific computations and machine learning require high computational power, which can otherwise be costly to monitor and maintain.

• Web applications: IaaS infrastructure hosts web applications, like servers, storage space, computation resources, clustering, and load balancing to support and scale to client requirements.

• Big data analytics: Big data requires high network throughput at high speed. IaaS offers the required network and computational resources to receive, process, and store all types of data that are ready for client use.

• Environment flexibility: With a flexible, highly scalable infrastructure managed by the cloud provider, developers are free to choose their desired operating systems, platforms, and tools to build their applications with minimal constraints.

• Data storage and scaling: To handle an evolving user base, IaaS provides exceptional speed and efficiency through limitless horizontal scaling (e.g., adding additional virtual machines) rather than finite horizontal scaling (e.g., adding more resources to a single system) which is often the case with traditional onsite hosting.

• Backup and recovery: A wide variety of backup and recovery options are available with IaaS providers that can provide redundancy to select portions of a client environment to a complete duplicate system running in parallel.

IaaS use case: MongoDB Atlas

MongoDB Atlas is the global cloud database service for modern applications and an excellent example of IaaS supporting a fully managed cloud database solution. MongoDB Atlas supports mobility and data distribution across major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously with multi-cloud clusters. Use MongoDB and your IaaS provider of choice to build gen AI experiences backed by your enterprise data. Deep integration between MongoDB Atlas and your provider's services makes it easy to create intelligent applications that are accurate, secure, and scalable.

Learn more about MongoDB Atlas.

What are the advantages of IaaS?

Organizations receive a variety of advantages from contracting for IaaS services from a cloud provider, including:

• Cost: It's cost-effective, as organizations can just lease or rent the resources on demand.

• Speed to market: Virtual machines can be spun up quickly and infrastructure changes take hours instead of days. In addition, since cloud providers are staffed to have resources available on demand, organizations can avoid their internal IT project queue waiting time.

• Scalability: Horizontal scaling and provider environment consistency eliminate the high cost and complexity of scaling traditional, in-house hardware deployments.

• Real-time load balancing: Underuse and overuse of resources is no longer an issue as IaaS clients can opt for a "pay for what you use" subscription model with many cloud providers.

• Time savings: Since internal resources are not responsible for the day-to-day troubleshooting, patching, and monitoring of the infrastructure, they can be focused on pursuing new application development in partnership with business leaders.

• Control: As developers still manage the other two layers (PaaS and SaaS), clients can customize their environment to their exact needs and specifications while receiving all the benefits of IaaS.

• Geographic unity: With IaaS, teams in global organizations can access the same resources using the same tools easily. This not only enables better business processes and continuity but also helps teams work better together when brainstorming new products and collaborating remotely.

MongoDB’s Atlas offsets initial costs by offering a free cluster and the easy scalability of Atlas makes it simple to switch for greater Atlas tiers as data volume and demand increases. In addition, Atlas’ Sharded Cluster Balancer ensures efficient operation and support of real-time demands on the system as it fluctuates. Further, Atlas offers always-on reliability. Your clusters are built for resilience with a minimum three-node replica set distributed across availability zones within a cloud region, protecting against regional and cloud outages with cross-region and cross-cloud failover.

Sign up for a free MongoDB Atlas cluster!

Example of IaaS

Example of IaaS along with the other cloud service model layers are:

IaaS: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

PaaS: Apache (web server), MongoDB (database), Linux (operating system), JRE (Java runtime environment), Heroku (supports multiple programming languages).

SaaS: Suite of products from MongoDB, GSuite, and Office 365.

Different cloud vendors providing various cloud computing service models

What are the disadvantages of IaaS?

As with everything, there are some potential disadvantages to IaaS:

• Bandwidth/disk space management: Due to the multi-tenant nature of IaaS, resources such as bandwidth and disk space may be unevenly shared or used up by certain organizations sharing the public cloud environment (e.g., a noisy neighbor), which may affect the overall network performance. However, a quality cloud provider will closely monitor this and quickly resolve issues as they occur.

• Outages: Although rare, network outages do happen, and with IaaS, the cloud provider is the only one who can address them. Client organizations can't address it themselves and have to wait for resolution.

• Cybercrime: Again, although rare, cybercrime does exist and can affect cloud providers as well as private organizations. That being said, most quality cloud providers have extremely strong cybersecurity postures and are vigilant in this area.

• Provider dependency: When an organization integrates a cloud provider's infrastructure, tools, etc. into their business processes and procedures, changing to another provider can be challenging. However, through due diligence when selecting a provider and considering future requirements, this concern can be minimized.

Key considerations when choosing an IaaS provider

There are a variety of IaaS providers available with limitless options and configurations to choose from. To make the best decision for your organization, it's important to consider IaaS best practices and requirements specific to your industry or organization. Of course, budget and ROI will also be key points of consideration as well. Here are some additional key elements to consider.

Security and reliability

When selecting an IaaS provider, narrowing down vendor candidates can begin with various compliance and governance requirements organizations may have. For example, healthcare organizations make a point of selecting HIPAA-compliant IaaS providers to host their infrastructure. Retail banking organizations often highly rank data encryption mechanisms, identity and access management (IAM), and multi-factor identification in addition to IaaS best practices relating to security and reliability. However, less regulated organizations have more leeway in considering a cloud service provider’s methods and certifications for securing underlying infrastructure.

Disaster recovery

Quick backup and recovery services with excellent data retention capabilities are key when industries are highly regulated and audited, let alone the average organization that is trying to maintain operational status. Carefully considering the minimum level of disaster recovery required for your organization is a delicate balance between compliance, risk mitigation, and budget.

Some common methods include:

• Backup and restore: Data and applications are regularly backed up to a remote or cloud-based location, and, in case of an adverse event, the stored backups can be deployed to continue operations. However, this solution can take hours or days and may not be acceptable for all organizations.
• Pilot light disaster recovery: In this method, a minimal version of an organization's operationally necessary environment is maintained in the cloud (e.g., pilot light) where the data is live but the system is idle, awaiting instructions. In doing so, critical systems can be back online in usually less than an hour while non-critical systems can be brought back via backup and restore. This solution helps organizations with budget constraints or various lines of business with varying degrees of criticality to select an appropriate disaster recovery plan for their needs.
• Warm stand-by: This method maintains a scaled-down version of an organization's full production environment which is constantly running in the cloud. In case of disaster, the stand-by system can immediately be deployed while additional resources can be scaled up to fully operational levels. Warm-standby disaster recovery can usually be completed in roughly 10 to 20 minutes but is more costly than backup and restore or pilot light methods.
• Hot stand-by: Sometimes referred to as "real-time backup," the hot stand-by method involves a duplicate, fully operational production environment running in parallel in the cloud. Since the hot stand-by is an up-to-date, exact copy of the original live environment, an almost instantaneous switchover can occur in seconds so that an outage wouldn't even be detected by the user. And, while this is certainly an excellent option, it can be prohibitively costly for many organizations.
• Multi-cloud disaster recovery: For highly regulated, real-time data dependent, global organizations, the multi-cloud method may make sense. This solution requires a duplicate, fully operational production be continually running in a competing cloud provider's infrastructure so that if Microsoft had a serious cloud service event, the organization could jump to its AWS or Google cloud immediately. And, while a very effective strategy, this method can be extremely complex and costly to instantiate.

The noisy neighbor problem

As other tenants using IaaS systems may suddenly increase resource usage (e.g., bandwidth), be sure to speak with possible IaaS providers in detail about how quickly they will detect these spikes, how they will be resolved, and what guaranteed service levels or remediation guarantees are in place. By choosing a provider who not only has high reliability ratings but also one that provides infrastructure fairly for all involved, organizations can feel more secure in their IaaS system availability.

Flexibility and options in providing virtual resources

Consider your network, storage, and compute requirements and the initial options a potential cloud services provider offers for server size, virtual machine size, number of processing units, memory units, storage units, etc. Do they have the ability to address organizational requirements on Day One, or will it require modifications that may impact the provider’s service level or maintenance schedule?

Scalability

For organizations anticipating rapid growth, or those whose system usage can vary greatly in the general course of business, discussions with potential cloud providers regarding not only their scaling services (e.g., notice, timing, available resources) but also the flexibility of their service contracts is key. Look for a provider with flexible plans where fees scale closely with actual infrastructure usage. For organizations anticipating a more steady state of infrastructure usage, a consistent subscription or license fee may be acceptable.

User level controls

Organizations with highly specialized needs or unique industry requirements must carefully consider the level of control they require over IaaS features selected with a potential IaaS provider. Specifically, are the features selected a) within client control consistently and b) easily accessible for client personnel? Third, what impact will this level of control have on the cloud provider's overall offering, services, and cost structure?

Network speed and availability

Evaluation of bandwidth, latency, and network throughput are certainly key points to evaluate with potential IaaS providers, as are network availability and resiliency. In addition, potential provider locations may be a consideration for global organizations where geographic location can impact latency due to physical infrastructure challenges (e.g., quality of fiber network in the region).