Businesses are getting rid of keeping data in traditional data centers and physical servers and are migrating to innovative and reliable cloud technologies. With several benefits of cloud computing including anytime data access, enhanced disaster recovery, improved flexibility and reduced infrastructure staff burden, enterprises are developing more cost-efficient applications with higher performance and more effortless scalability.
IaaS, one such cloud computing model, has made lives of both enterprises and developers simpler by reducing their burden of thinking about infrastructure.
But, how do enterprises know if they need to opt-in for IaaS?
Understanding Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
IaaS refers to the cloud services offered over a network allowing businesses to access their infrastructure remotely. A perfect fit for any size enterprise, it offers the advantage of not having to buy hardware or other equipment, and easily manage firewalls, IP addresses, servers, routers, load balancing, virtual desktop hosting, storage, and much more, cost-effectively through a scalable cloud model.
It gives organizations the flexibility to spend only for the services used, which gives an edge to IaaS cloud computing over traditional on-premise resources. The businesses find it easier to scale by paying per usage from an unlimited pool of computing resources instead of wasting resources on new hardware.
Why Opt For IaaS Cloud Model?
IaaS is beneficial for organizations for a number of reasons. Let’s discuss its benefits in detail-
Usage of Virtual Resources
Your organization might never have to think of investing in resources such as CPU cores, hard disk or storage space, RAM, virtual network switches, VLANs, IP addresses and more, giving you the feeling of owning a virtual datacenter.
It allows multiple users to access a single hardware anywhere and anytime over an internet connection, keeping their users on the move. And in case even if a server goes down or a hardware fails, its services aren’t affected, offering greater reliability.
Cost Savings With Pay-As-You-Go Pricing Model
With metered usage, enterprises need to pay for the time when the services were used and avoid fixed monthly and annual rental fees and any upfront charges. This is beneficial as it leads to lower infrastructure costs and also prevents them from having to buy more capacity to have a back-up for a sudden business spike. IaaS providers gives users an opportunity to purchase storage space, wherein they need to be careful as the pricing may differ with providers.
Highly Scalable, Flexible and Quicker
One of the greatest benefits of IaaS is the ability to scale up and down quickly in response to an enterprise’s requirements. IaaS providers generally have the latest, most powerful storage, servers and networking technology to accommodate the needs of their customers. This on-demand scalability provides added flexibility and greater agility to respond to changing opportunities and requirements. Also, with IaaS the process of time to market the product is much more fastened to get the job done.
High Availability
Business continuity and preparing for disaster recovery are the top drivers for adopting IaaS infrastructure. It remains a highly available infrastructure, and unlike the traditional hostings, even in case of a disaster, it offers its users the flexibility to access the infrastructure via an internet connection.
With a robust architecture and scalable infrastructure layer, organizations can consolidate their different disaster recovery systems into a virtualized environment for disaster recovery, for securing their data. This stands as the perfect use case for IaaS.
By outsourcing their infrastructure, organizations can focus their time and resources on innovation and developing new techniques in applications and solutions.
How Do You Choose Between IaaS, Containers or Serverless?
The next question you might have is how to make a choice between opting for IaaS cloud computing model, containers or serverless model?
Well, the one thing they all share in common is that they simplify the developer’s life by letting them focus only on generating code. Let’s look into the differences:
|
IaaS |
Containers |
Serverless |
|
|
Features |
Instantly available virtualized computing resources over the internet, eliminating the need of hardware |
Contains application and associated elements needed to run the application properly with all dependencies |
Broken up into functions and hosted by a third-party vendor |
|
Use Case |
Organizations can consolidate their disaster recovery systems into one virtualized environment for backup, securing data |
Refactoring bigger monolithic application into smaller independent parts, eg: splitting a large application into a few separate services such as user management, media conversion etc. |
For applications which do not always need to be running. |
|
Vendor Operability |
Cloud vendor manages infrastructure |
No vendor lock-in |
Vendor lock-in |
|
Pricing Model |
Cheap |
At least one VM instance with containers hosted is always running, hence costlier than serverless. |
Pay for what you use; cost-effective |
|
Maintenance |
User responsible for patching and security hardening |
Not maintained by cloud providers; developers are responsible for its maintenance |
Nothing to manage |
|
Web Technology Hosting |
Can host any technology, Windows, Linux, any web server technology |
Only Linux-based deployments |
Not made for hosting web applications |
|
Scalability |
More |
Less |
More |
|
Deployment Time |
Instantly available |
Take longer to set up initially than serverless |
Take milliseconds to deploy |
IaaS is the most flexible model and suits best to the needs of temporary, experimental and unexpected workloads. Srijan is an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner. Leveraging AWS’s vast repository of tools, we can help you choose the best option for outsourcing your infrastructure for you to achieve your business goals. Contact us to get started with your IaaS journey.
