Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

In Infrastructure as a Service the purpose is to deliver self-deployment of virtual machines in a cloud. This can replace the traditional data-center.

Using IaaS has a couple of advantages:

• from the customer perspective is pay for the used computing time only
• very quick, very flexible way to react to business needs. Instead of waiting for weeks, an administrator can just spin off virtual machine and start within matter of seconds

AWS is the blueprint of many IaaS solutions. If you are worked with AWS, it is pretty similar with that OpenStack is trying to do. OpenStack is an open source IaaS cloud.