Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) [English]

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Syndetic Relationships

InterPARES Definition

n. (IaaS, abbr.) ~ A low-level cloud service, with fundamental resources, such as processing, storage, and networks, managed by the provider, giving the consumer the ability to rapidly and conveniently deploy the platform and software.

Other Definitions

  • Gartner IT Glossary (†298 s.v. infrastructure as a service (IaaS)): A standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities are owned and hosted by a service provider and offered to customers on-demand. Customers are able to self-provision this infrastructure, using a Web-based graphical user interface that serves as an IT operations management console for the overall environment. API access to the infrastructure may also be offered as an option.
  • Mell and Grance 2011 (†334 p. 2): The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

Citations

  • Cloud Security Alliance 2010 (†592 p. 11): IaaS vendors deliver their services in a scalable way by sharing infrastructure. Often, the underlying components that make up this infrastructure (e.g., CPU caches, GPUs, etc.) were not designed to offer strong isolation properties for a multi-tenant architecture. To address this gap, a virtualization hypervisor mediates access between guest operating systems and the physical compute resources. Still, even hypervisors have exhibited flaws that have enabled guest operating systems to gain inappropriate levels of control or influence on the underlying platform. A defense in depth strategy is recommended, and should include compute, storage, and network security enforcement and monitoring. Strong compartmentalization should be employed to ensure that individual customers do not impact the operations of other tenants running on the same cloud provider. (†1371)
  • Duranti 2013 (†408 ): Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers the consumer on-demand access to the basic computing infrastructure of servers, software, and network equipment. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying Cloud hardware and software infrastructure components, but has broad freedom and control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and some networking components (e.g. host firewalls). Security of consumer-chosen elements is carried out mainly by the consumer. (†488)
  • Furht and Escalante 2010 (†583 p.340): Large-scale computer hardware and high computer network connectivity are essential components of an effective IaaS. The IaaS is categorized into: (1) Computation as a Service (CaaS), in which virtual machine based servers are rented and charged per hour based on the virtual machine capacity – mainly CPU and RAM size, features of the virtual machine, OS and deployed software; and (2) Data as a Service (DaaS), in which unlimited storage space is used to store the user’s data regardless of its type, charged per GByte for data size and data transfer. (†1149)
  • ISACA Glossary (†743 s.v. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)): Offers the capability to provision processing, storage, networks and other fundamental computing resources, enabling the customer to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems (OSs) and applications. (†1781)
  • McLelland, et al. 2014 (†403 8): Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) refers to the provision of access to hardware (e.g. hard disks, servers, etc.). This service allows the client to rent, rather than purchase IT infrastructure on an as-needed basis, allowing it to easily and quickly increase infrastructure capacity when required. The most commonly promoted benefit of this service is the cost saving to the client who no longer needs to purchase and maintain infrastructure. This “rented” infrastructure can then be accessed remotely by members of the client organization. [Text includes citations] (†456)
  • NIST 2011B (†415 p. 21): The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls). (Source: NIST CC Definition) (†522)
  • Stancic, Rajg, and Milosevic 2013 (†904 p. 110): Ability to deliver complete virtual datacenters to the user who is then able to configure and deploy virtual machines and other relevant/corresponding virtual components according to their personalized requirements (†2720)
  • Wikipedia (†387 s.v. "Cloud computing"): In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers – physical or (more often) virtual machines – and other resources. (A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.) IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw block storage, and file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers. For wide-area connectivity, customers can use either the Internet or carrier clouds (dedicated virtual private networks). (†567)