Sunday, October 18, 2015

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers you software and hardware infrastructure components such as servers, operating systems, and network. Vendors will provide "templatized" or "pre-loaded" infrastructure with operating systems or database software; e.g., Windows Server 2008, Linux Ubuntu 14.10, or SQL Server 2012. You do not have to purchase servers or network equipment, license software, or rent data center space—instead you "rent" these resources from a vendor as a completely outsourced service.

While subscribing to this service, you are only required to manage your application, data, middleware, and runtime. The vendor manages your server—commonly delivered via virtualization and networking. The most significant advantage of this approach is that it allows you to avoid buying hardware, reduces project lead times, increases your ROI, and streamlines and automates scaling. For many project owners, IaaS is a first foray into the cloud world, especially scaling out to meet seasonal demand for processing capacity.

You should consider IaaS for the following workload situations:
- Demand is volatile or seasonal, such as on Black Monday.

- Time to market is critical, including time to provision and deploy.

- You have hard limits on budgets and capital expenditure.

- Your business has trial or temporary needs.

And on the contrary, here are a few situations in which IaaS may not be a good fit for your applications:

- Higher levels of scale and performance are required by your application than is supported.

- You have significantly high integration needs, especially with on-premises systems.

- Other cloud types, especially PaaS, may offer better ROI in the long term.

Taken from : Hardening Azure Applications

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