Infrastructure as a service

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Infrastructure as a service" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article may be confusing or unclear to readers. In particular, the article uses jargon-like language unsuitable for all readers, and offers little explanation/context for the ideas introduced. Please help clarify the article. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (April 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, network, servers, and virtualization (which mostly refers, in this case, to emulating computer hardware). This service enables users to free themselves from maintaining an on-premises data center.^[1] The IaaS provider is hosting these resources in either the public cloud (meaning users share the same hardware, storage, and network devices with other users), the private cloud (meaning users do not share these resources), or the hybrid cloud (combination of both).^[2]

It provides the customer with high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like backup, data partitioning, scaling, security, physical computing resources, etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines as well as the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.