DEFINITION

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing that provides
virtualized computing resources over the internet. IaaS is one of the three main
categories of cloud computing services, alongside software as a service (SaaS) and
platform as a service (PaaS).
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IaaS architecture and how it works

 In an IaaS model, a cloud provider hosts the infrastructure components

traditionally present in an on-premises data center, including servers,
storage and networking hardware, as well as the virtualization

 The IaaS provider also supplies a range of services to accompany those

infrastructure components. These can include detailed billing, monitoring,
log access, security, load balancing and clustering, as well as storage
resiliency, such as backup, replication and recovery. These services are
increasingly policy-driven, enabling IaaS users to implement greater levels
of automation and orchestration for important infrastructure tasks. For
example, a user can implement policies to drive load balancing to maintain
application availability and performance.

 IaaS customers access resources and services through a wide area network
(WAN), such as the internet, and can use the cloud provider's services to
install the remaining elements of an application stack. For example, the user
can log in to the IaaS platform to create virtual machines (VMs); install
operating systems in each VM; deploy middleware, such as databases; create
storage buckets for workloads and backups; and install the enterprise
workload into that VM. Customers can then use the provider's services to
 track costs, monitor performance, balance network traffic, troubleshoot
application issues, manage disaster recovery and more.

 Any cloud computing model requires the participation of a provider. The

provider is often a third-party organization that specializes in selling
IaaS. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are
examples of independent IaaS providers. A business might also opt to deploy
a private cloud, becoming its own provider of infrastructure services.

IaaS pros and cons

 Organizations choose IaaS because it is often easier, faster and more cost-
efficient to operate a workload without having to buy, manage and support
the underlying infrastructure. With IaaS, a business can simply rent or lease
that infrastructure from another business.

 IaaS is an effective model for workloads that are temporary, experimental or

that change unexpectedly. For example, if a business is developing a new
software product, it might be more cost-effective to host and test the
application using an IaaS provider. Once the new software is tested and
refined, the business can remove it from the IaaS environment for a more
traditional, in-house deployment. Conversely, the business could commit
that piece of software to a long-term IaaS deployment, where the costs of a
long-term commitment may be less.

 In general, IaaS customers pay on a per use basis, typically by the hour, week
or month. Some IaaS providers also charge customers based on the amount
of virtual machine space they use. This pay-as-you-go model eliminates the
capital expense of deploying in-house hardware and software.

 When a business cannot use third-party providers, a private cloud built on

premises can still offer the control and scalability of IaaS -- though the cost
benefits no longer apply.
  Despite its flexible, pay-as-you-go model, IaaS billing can be a problem for
some businesses. Cloud billing is extremely granular, and it is broken out to
reflect the precise usage of services. It is common for users to experience
sticker shock -- or finding costs to be higher than expected -- when reviewing
the bills for every resource and service involved in an application
deployment. Users should monitor their IaaS environments and bills closely
to understand how IaaS is being used, and to avoid being charged for
unauthorized services.

 Insight is another common problem for IaaS users. Because IaaS providers
own the infrastructure, the details of their infrastructure configuration and
performance are rarely transparent to IaaS users. This lack of transparency
can make systems management and monitoring more difficult for users.

 IaaS users are also concerned about service resilience. The workload's
availability and performance is highly dependent on the provider. If an IaaS
provider experiences network bottlenecks or any form of internal or external
downtime, the users' workloads will be affected. In addition, because IaaS is
a multi-tenant architecture, the noisy neighbor issue can negatively impact
users' workloads.

Major IaaS vendors and products

There are many examples of IaaS vendors and products. AWS offers storage
services such as Simple Storage Services (S3) and Glacier, as well as compute
services, including its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). GCP offers storage and compute
services through Google Compute Engine (GCE), as does Microsoft Azure.

 These are just a tiny sample of the broad range of services offered by major
IaaS providers. Services can include serverless functions, such as AWS
Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions; database access; big
data compute environments; monitoring; logging; and more.
  There are also many other smaller, or more niche players in the IaaS
marketplace, including Rackspace Managed Cloud, CenturyLink Cloud,
DigitalOcean and more.

 Users will need to carefully consider the services, reliability and costs before
choosing a provider -- and be ready to select an alternate provider and to
redeploy to the alternate infrastructure if necessary.

Choosing an IaaS provider for traditional vs. cloud native apps

 As IaaS providers expand their portfolios to include more higher-level
services, the requirements of your apps -- not just your infrastructure --
should drive vendor choice.

 After years of foot-dragging, most IT organizations have concluded that

resistance to cloud infrastructure is futile. Industry giants Amazon Web
Services and Microsoft Azure are approaching sales of a billion dollars a
month, and major businesses, such as Capital One, GE and Netflix, have
moved business IT operations to infrastructure as a service.
Question:
For most IT organizations isn't if they should use cloud services,
but when,where and which ones:
 Knowing when to use cloud computing is a matter of corporate strategy and
IT cloud maturity. But determining where and which services -- namely the
list of applications to migrate and which infrastructure as a service
[IaaS] providers to adopt.
 Depends on a myriad of factors, including legacy infrastructure, private and
hybrid cloud plans, application architecture, service requirements, existing
vendor relationships, regulatory requirements and the need for global reach
and distribution.
 To be successful, an organization needs to look closely at the capabilities,
advantages and drawbacks of a potential IaaS provider. Then, evaluate
options in light of existing and planned application portfolios.
Growing IaaS market
 Though the worldwide market for cloud infrastructure is still fragmented, a
handful of vendors garner just over half the total revenue: Amazon Web
Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and
Salesforce. Figures compiled by Synergy Research show that AWS alone
owns about one-third of the IaaS market, while both Azure and Google are
growing annually at triple-digit rates.
 AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are the most common options for a public IaaS
provider. IBM, meanwhile, provides an interesting mix of an open source
IaaS, IBM platform as a service (PaaS) and hosted bare-metal servers. With
IBM's use of OpenStack for IaaS and hybrid cloud, one could lump it into the
broader OpenStack public cloud ecosystem, alongside DreamHost, Internap
and Rackspace. However, IBM has a richer portfolio than those other
options.
 VMware -- given its dominant position as the virtualization platform of
choice in business data centers --is an IaaS provider worth mentioning
because of its vCloud Air product and network of service partners. VMware's
vCloud illustrates an important distinction between public cloud services: the
level of support for hybrid deployments. Although all vendors provide ways
of securely connecting private infrastructure and public resources, AWS and
Google are notable for only being available as shared services. In contrast,
OpenStack and vCloud can be deployed and managed by internal IT.
 Although Salesforce has some sophisticated application development
services, it's primarily used as a packaged application, or software as a
service, rather than an application platform, or platform as a service.
Salesforce, a result, is qualitatively different from the other four cloud
leaders.
 Infrastructure and platform services were once considered well-defined and
distinct service paradigms. Over time, traditional IaaS vendors have added
richer, higher-level features, such as machine learning, business intelligence
(BI), streaming data ingestion, mobile app back ends and serverless, event-
driven microservices to their portfolios. The result is considerable overlap
between products, such as AWS or Azure, and traditional, pure-play PaaS
products, such as Cloud Foundry, Force.com, Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift.
  Although AWS and Azure don't draw sharp distinctions between their
infrastructure and platform services, Google and IBM do, with clearly
identified and branded PaaS stacks. Blending IaaS and PaaS means
the selection of a cloud provider is no longer IT's alone, since it's not a choice
solely about infrastructure. With the growing variety and sophistication of
application services, along with alternative deployment vehicles, such as
containers and event-driven compute services, developers play an
increasingly important, and perhaps central, role in evaluating and selecting
a cloud IaaS provider.
Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Revenue to Grow 17.3 Percent in 2019
Integrated IaaS and PaaS Offerings to Drive Next Wave of Cloud Infrastructure
Adoption

 The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.3

percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018,
according to Gartner, Inc. In 2018, Gartner forecasts that the market will
grow 21 percent, up from $145.3 billion in 2017.
 The fastest-growing segment of the market is cloud system infrastructure
services (infrastructure as a service or IaaS), which is forecast to grow 27.6
percent in 2019 to reach $39.5 billion, up from $31 billion in 2018 (see Table
1).
 By 2022, Gartner expects that 90 percent of organizations purchasing public
cloud IaaS will do so from an integrated IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS)
provider, and will use both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities from that provider.

Table 1. Worldwide Public Cloud Service Revenue Forecast (Billions of U.S.

Dollars)

2017 2018 2019 2020 2021

Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) 42.2 46.6 50.3 54.1 58.1

Cloud Application Infrastructure Services

(PaaS) 11.9 15.2 18.8 23.0 27.7

Cloud Application Services (SaaS) 58.8 72.2 85.1 98.9 113.1

Cloud Management and Security Services 8.7 10.7 12.5 14.4 16.3

Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) 23.6 31.0 39.5 49.9 63.0

Total Market 145.3 175.8 206.2 240.3 278.3

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS =

platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Source: Gartner (September 2018)

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud market, with
revenue expected to grow 17.8 percent to reach $85.1 billion in 2019.
“The increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services impacts the
management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content,” Craig Roth,
research vice president at Gartner. “Organizations are steadily — but not
exclusively — shifting their content environments to SaaS. Gartner expects that by
2019, the current enterprise content management(ECM) market will devolve into
purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and solution services applications.”
In the business process as a service (BPaaS) category, Gartner forecasts a revenue
growth of 7.9 percent, to reach $50.3 billion in 2019. Gartner found that especially
in this category, buyers increasingly expect deep domain expertise, technology and
global deployment capabilities from their providers as well as service portfolios
that bridge legacy offerings and support new automated, digital and cloud service
delivery paradigms.

Cloud native vs. traditional apps drive IaaS provider choice

 A fundamental factor when evaluating an IaaS provider is your application
type. This illustrates the role developers must play in the selection process,
because the cloud is far more than a new deployment location.

 Whether you call it cloud-native or third platform, cloud services have

ushered in new ways of designing, partitioning, scaling, testing and deploying
applications. Cloud-first, greenfield apps are extremely modular. They are
built around cloud services and application program interface (API) calls,
designed for shared infrastructure and can be quickly deployed, moved and
scaled. In contrast, legacy, client-server applications are built assuming
ownership of an entire OS. They are shoehorned into shared infrastructure
via hypervisors and VMs; in other words, they can run on, but aren't built for,
the cloud.

 This architectural distinction has profound implications on the type of cloud

service, and IaaS provider, that's best for a particular organization. Some
products mimic the VM environment of internal data centers; others are
mostly a collection of RESTful services and APIs that can be mashed up into
 any type of application. A prime example of these contrasting approaches is
the bifurcation of EMC/VMware's private cloud product line. Its Enterprise
Hybrid Cloud based on vSphere is designed for traditional applications, while
the Native Hybrid Cloud targets next-generation, modular, microservices-
based designs.

 The dichotomy carries over to the public cloud. For example, by offering
basic compute, storage volumes, file systems and private networks, AWS can
be made to look like a bunch of VMs and network-attached storage running
in a private data center. That would be perfect for legacy databases and
server-based applications. However, AWS can also be a platform for
applications that are infrastructure-agnostic and based on higher-level
services, such as NoSQL databases, BI processing, Hadoop-like clusters,
message queues, push notification services, media transcoders and search
engines.

 When choosing an IaaS provider, consider the type of applications you'll

deploy and where they fall on the spectrum between traditional and cloud-
native. Applications that fall predominantly on the traditional side of the
range will work best on systems like vCloud or SoftLayer bare-metal servers
that resemble traditional VM infrastructure. Those shifted to the cloud-
native side are better suited for an IaaS and PaaS combination, such as those
from AWS, Azure or Google.