IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service

❖   IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing model whereby all the infrastructure is provided and maintained by the provider: servers, storage, networking, and so on. With IaaS, an organization can make wise investment in quickly growing with cloud rather than wasting huge amounts on purchasing and installing new hardware.

Similar to IaaS you simply pay a monthly fee to use resources as per your needs and the cloud provider is responsible for ensuring the maintenance of all the hardware and virtualized services.

IaaS includes virtual server space, IP addresses, network connections, internet connection, firewalls, bandwidths and load balancers etc.The major appeal behind IaaS is that delivers virtualized software & hardware computing resources.

Infrastructure as a service is the foundation and plays an important role for many enterprises on their journey towards Platform-as-a-service ( PaaS). It provides them the ability to create base compute images that provide network, storage and compute resource on-demand via automation.

IaaS services can also be used by enterprises to create easily-scalable and cost-effective methods of providing IT solutions.Compared to SaaS and PaaS, IaaS users are responsible for managing applications, data, runtime, middleware and OSes.

Providers still manage virtualization, servers, hard drives, storage, and networking. Many IaaS providers like pishro now offer databases, messaging queues, and other services above the virtualization layer as well.

❖    IaaS Characteristics

Some characteristics to look for when considering IaaS are:

• Resources are available as a service
• The cost varies depending on consumption
• Services are highly scalable
• Typically includes multiple users on a single piece of hardware
• Provides complete control of the infrastructure to organizations
• Dynamic and flexible

• IaaS Examples 

The following are some examples as to how IaaS can be used by businesses:

1)Cloud hosting

Hosting websites in the cloud is beneficial because it mitigates the vulnerability of physical servers. Unexpected demands and scalability can also be handled more easily in the cloud.

2)Private clouds

Accessible only by employees of the business – can help keep data confidential and provide more secure transfer of data. This infrastructure can be scaled by expanding businesses to match growth.

3)Virtual Data Centres

A network of virtual servers that are interconnected can provide superior cloud hosting abilities, enterprise-level IT infrastructure or the ability to integrate all of these processes in a public or private cloud.

• Example of IaaS provider

DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco Metapod, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Pishro Cloud Computing

❖   Benefits of having IaaS Cloud computing

IaaS is beneficial for  your organizations for a number of reasons.

• Resources are distributed as a service: The resources include CPU cores, hard disk or storage space, RAM, virtual network switches, vLANs, IP addresses and more. An IaaS provider provides its users with the hardware and the provisioning software that allows them to work as if they own a physical datacenter.

• Focus on business growth: Time, money and energy spent making technology decisions and hiring staff to manage and maintain the technology infrastructure is time not spent on growing the business. By moving infrastructure to a service-based model, organizations can focus their time and resources where they belong, on developing innovations in applications and solutions.

• Give you and your Employees Ubiquitous Accessibility :Regardless of where you or your employees are, as long as you are using a desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone and you have internet connectivity you can access your cloud server.  This is especially beneficial when employees need to work remotely for whatever reason or need to collaborate with multiple workers on a presentation.

• IaaS can run successfully even if a server goes down: Infrastructure as a Service provides greater reliability in which cloud providers can spread resources across multiple servers and data centers. It means if a particular hardware component fails or even if an entire data center goes offline, an organization’s infrastructure would not be affected.

• Get Started Immediately – The IaaS provider already has an infrastructure in place, enabling organizations to easily get their computing environment up and running in the cloud.

• You need to pay for only those services that you need and Makes Costs Predictable : with IaaS offerings you have to pay only for the time when the resources are used and only for those services that you actually need.IT Infrastructures can sometimes be more costly than expected, especially hardware upgrades or replacement is necessary.
  When companies more to the cloud they are no longer responsible for upgrading servers, routers or any other physical component. There will also be no need to replace failing hardware because that is also the cloud provider’s responsibility.

• Tight Security Controls – Hosting systems for multiple organizations, IaaS providers must have tight security measures in place to ensure that their customers’ infrastructures are protected from potential breaches.

Thus, IaaS can successfully remove the complexities and expenses associated with your IT infrastructure.

❖    When to Use IaaS

If you are a startup or a small company, IaaS is a great option so you don’t have to spend the time or money trying to create hardware and software. IaaS is also beneficial for large organizations who wish to have complete control over their applications and infrastructures but are looking for only purchase what is actually consumed or needed. For rapidly growing companies, IaaS can be a good option as you don’t have to commit to a specific hardware or software as your needs change and evolve.

It also helps if you are unsure what demands a new application will need as there is a lot of flexibility to scale up or down as needed.

❖  Using OpenStack for IaaS

OpenStack is a cloud computing platform. To make the virtual cloud computing technology flexible, businesses who want to create private or public clouds, need to be able to create and manage VMs fastly.

OpenStack creates abstracted pools of storage, compute and networking resources that can be used to create VMs on top of the server hardware.

If you want to experience this, use pishro cloud service and you will get the service with the following features:

• Complete management of application lifecycle.
• Ready integration with public clouds and virtualized environments.
• Ability to harness full power of an OpenStack cloud.
• Service logs.
• Block and object storage
• Direct object access
• Unlimited storage
• Easily add capacity

There are many reasons that it makes sense for organizations to turn their infrastructure over to the cloud; however finding the right service provider is a big part of the success of moving to this model.

Choosing a reliable vendor that offers the features and functionality at the right price point is essential.you can trust on pishro cloud computing and enjoy your business.

• Vmware vCloud vs OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud computing platform. OpenStack provides an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and constitutes of resources such as compute, storage and network resources.OpenStack is a manager of multiple hypervisors. It is a collection of tools for managing and orchestrating cloud resources.

VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor but not a Cloud platform or toolkit. The VMware products that most directly map to OpenStack are not vSphere or ESXi, but vCloud Automation Center and vCloud Director. In fact, OpenStack does not have its own hypervisor but manages different hypervisors, such as KVM, Xen, Hyper-V AND ESXi. OpenStack is an open source system. It is fully distributed system. OpenStack keeps its services as decoupled as possible. This is designed to provide massive scalability. Vmware ESXi has tightly coupled architecture

• Industries:OpenStack is for cloud management platform for large providers,carriers and large outsources but Vmware is for virtualization for enterprises.

• Hypervisor:OpenStack supports variants of hypervisor and container such as KVM,Xen,VMware ESXi,Microsoft HYPER-V,Citrix XEN,Docker,LXC but VMware supports ESXi as the only default hypervisor

• Customer and operation access:OpenStack native dashboard, CLI but Vmware windows clients, vCloud Director

• Image management:OpenStack Glance Image service, support all popular image formats but vmware catalogs & templates,OVF import

• Management System:Nova (cluster controller) but Vmware vCenter

• APIs :For OpenStack based on Open REST APIs, compatibility with Amazon EC2 & S3, for Vmware is proprietary,mostly only under Perl and Powershell

• Storage:pluggable cinder:block volumes,Ceph,several vendor SAN but Vmware VMFS over SAN and iSCSI

• High Availability:Nova for VMs HA; OpenStack HA project for infrastructure components but Vmware vCenter Heartbeat

• Skills: for OpenStack high-end skills required,including system and network but for Vmware,basic system administration is needed

• Expansion: no actual limitation on OpenStack but Max 32 physical nodes on vmware vCloud,though not recommended

• Certification:certification by training companies such as Mirantis and Red Hat but all certification by Vmware company

Following table shows comparison of technical and non-technical features of VMware and OpenStack in brief:

VMware and OpenStack comparison

❖    Conclusion

Cloud Computing is a powerful and flexible software Environment .IaaS is one of the three fundamental cloud service model.Infrastructure as a service allows for programmed deployment of servers, storage, processing power, and networking. IaaS clients have true control over their infrastructure.

The main use of IaaS include the actual deployment and development of PaaS, SaaS, and web-scale application. comparison between Vmware and OpenStack is given and it shows that Vmware solves for the enterprise and OpenStack solves for cloud and both technology and philosophy are differ.

• references

1. https://www.znetlive.com/blog/what-is-iaas-and-benefits-of-iaas/
2. https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2014/03/infrastructure-service-5-important-benefits
3. https://www.softwareadvisoryservice.com/infrastructure/introduction-to-iaas-infrastructure-as-a-service/
4. http://www.siasmsp.com/benefits-of-infrastructure-as-a-service-iaas/
5. https://www.bmc.com/blogs/saas-vs-paas-vs-iaas-whats-the-difference-and-how-to-choose/
6. https://stackify.com/top-iaas-providers/
7. https://www.slideshare.net/RoozbehShafiee/comparing-openstack-and-vmware
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286733848/download
9. https://www.vaultnetworks.com/what-is-iaas-and-how-can-it-benefit-your-company/
10. https://apprenda.com/library/paas/iaas-paas-saas-explained-compared/