Cloud Computing For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Seeing Infrastructure as a Service

In This Chapter

• Comparing ISPs and IaaS

• Looking at Amazon's EC2

• Checking out the IaaS competitive landscape

• Enabling technology for IaaS

• Trusting the trusted cloud

In this chapter, we investigate Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a little more depth.

Note

IaaS is the delivery of computer hardware (servers, networking technology, storage, and data center space) as a service. You also can expect it to include the delivery of operating systems and virtualization technology to manage the resources. The IaaS customers rent computing resources instead of buying and installing them in their own data center.

Tracing IaaS to ISP

Most commentators place the dawn of IaaS when Amazon launched its Electric Cloud Computing (EC2) service in 2006. Amazon's move into the market was definitely a step forward. But long before then, Internet service providers (ISPs) were happily renting out servers to companies.

Note

Why are we talking about ISPs in terms of IaaS? If you look at the ISP business model and technology infrastructure, you see a lot of similarities to the IaaS model. In fact, if you compare what customers get from an ISP to what they get from an IaaS vendor, you see that it's pretty much the same capability. Both rent infrastructure for the purpose of running applications.

Therefore, the good news is that infrastructure as a service is actually the maturation of the ISP model. The key difference is the addition of new technologies such as virtualization ...