Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the first layer of the cloud computing technology mentioned in our previous article. Now, we are going to look at it in details.
IaaS capacities
Infrastructure as a Service providers use virtualisation which enables them to minimize the idle hardware, protect the data against data loss, in case of breach and downtime and responds to the spikes in demand. If a hosting provider uses virtualisation, they can significantly drop the business cost involved in physical hardware and their maintenance and save resources.
On top of this if they use IaaS providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and launch new servers with the operating system of their choice on demand for pennies an hour, they will not reduce the overall cost but increase the overall performance as well. This keeps you away from purchasing bunch of expensive hardware and use provider like Amazon’s heavy-duty IaaS.
Structure of IaaS
A massive number of web sites that we visit are more of a Web Application than the just Web Sites. This is because they look, feel and behave like a web application rather than just a web site. The most noticeable change is, most of the websites reload the page when a button is clicked to navigate somewhere or something. On the next load, the new information is updated and shown. But with the web application, the page is reloaded but the information comes in as a slide as if there were no reload that took place.
Now, these web applications are fantastic but as more people start accessing the application the more resources that will be used. Therefore, often more capacity is added to the existing storage to afford such traffic. Your application can also be distributed among multiple servers if designed like that, so that you can add more virtual servers if you need them.
Advantages of IaaS
Still we are on the surface and AWS provides many services which is needed to drive complex, popular web applications like unlimited data storage, database, servers, caching, media hosting etc and all of them are billed by usage. One of the catch here is that, we do not have to maintain the hardware but we do have to responsible for setting up, configuration and for the maintenance of the operating system and software of any virtual machines we created. Now this is not an easy task and require knowledge of operating system and time management. By any chance, if all of these sound too complicated, you need to go one level above this layer called PaaS.