Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Colocation is great, but there's still a lot that I have to manage then, which takes a lot of time and energy. Now that we have virtualization, it really opened up the door to have infrastructure as a service. Infrastructure as a service really allows us to offload a big portion of what we normally would have to manage.

What infrastructure as a service is

Infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, is the on-demand access to computer resources like servers, storage and networking. Essentially, they're just managing a lot more aspects, all of the physical aspects of this data center, and then they're just provisioning certain parts of that to us.

So here we have the data center. They're providing the network, the storage, the servers, and the virtualization on top of that. What we would do then is we install the operating system, the middleware, runtime, data and application layer. So we would be responsible from the operating system up. Just to see what this looks like from our virtualization standpoint: they're managing everything from the hypervisor and below, and we don't need to worry about that.

What we do is we log into their system, we spin up a new operating system, and then we have access to install the services on top of that. Now we have a lot of control over our environment still, but we don't have to manage any of this lower-end infrastructure stuff. The cloud provider manages all of that, and provided that the cloud provider is doing their job, they can do the security correctly from that side of it, and then we do the security from the OS and up.

A look at AWS EC2

Here I'm on the Amazon Web Services site, and I'm specifically on the EC2 on-demand pricing, so I'm looking at the pricing for EC2. What this is, is their infrastructure as a service. So they're managing the whole infrastructure, but what I can do is spin up specific machines for this.

Let's take a look at what that looks like down here. First of all, I can select the region. The region is just the location, so I can select a lot of different regions here. But what I'm going to do here is select the operating system. What operating system do I want? I have several Linux examples here. I've got Red Hat. I can do an Ubuntu server. Or I'm going to do Windows — I'm going to select Windows here, and it's showing me the prices.

Down here, these are the different instances, and essentially this is just the size. Let's look at a T3 extra large. A T3 extra large is going to cost me 24 cents per hour. It has four CPUs, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and then some other stats here. But the point is that I can select a specific size, and it's going to charge me 24 cents per hour.

What I would do is spin this up. There are a couple of selection things where I can choose some different types of storage and how big that storage is, so there are a few selection pieces along the way. And then what it would do is it would turn on, I could log into that, and now what I can see is that operating system. I'm on a Windows machine, and I can start turning up my services. So maybe I want some sort of web application, so I can install maybe Apache on there and then turn it into a web server, and then I would have access to it.

But I'm in charge of managing that operating system, and then AWS is in charge of managing the whole infrastructure. It's a virtual server, so I don't have to manage any of the hardware or any of the networking or anything like that. It's all done through that operating system and above.