IaaS, short for Infrastructure as a Service, is a cloud computing model that provides basic IT resources via the internet. In contrast to conventional investments, it enables flexible and demand-driven access to infrastructure services.
IaaS consists of physical data centers, virtual computing power and cloud storage types such as block, file and object storage. The main advantage of IaaS is the on-demand provision of infrastructure services by the cloud provider. This gives customers maximum control over their IT resources, similar to traditional on-premise IT environments. IaaS supports various use cases, from development environments to data storage. Billing is based on consumption, with various pricing models available, including subscriptions and reserved instances.
The benefits of IaaS include usage-based billing, fast resource provisioning, high availability, easy scalability and improved latency and performance. As a key component of cloud computing, IaaS plays a crucial role in modern IT infrastructures.