Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service where enterprises rent or lease servers for compute and storage in the cloud. Users can run any operating system or applications on the rented servers without the maintenance and operating costs of those servers. Other advantages of Infrastructure as a Service include giving customers access to servers in geographic locations close to their end users. IaaS automatically scales, both up and down, depending on demand and provides guaranteed service-level agreement (SLA) both in terms of uptime and performance. It eliminates the need to manually provision and manage physical servers in data centers.
Offerings in an IaaS environment typically include network connections, virtual server space, load balancers, and IP addresses. An IaaS provider usually also offers a range of services to the consumer for supporting their infrastructure components. These may include monitoring, detailed billing, security, load balancing, clustering, and storage services like data backup, replication, and recovery.