Infrastructure as a service

In IaaS, the hosting provider will host the virtual machine (VM) on behalf of the consumer at their end.

The consumer, with just a few clicks on the resources that are needed (RAM, CPU, and network), will be provided a server on the cloud.

The consumer does not control the underlying infrastructure, such as virtualization software, physical security, and hardware. It is the cloud provider's responsibility to handle the reliability of hardware and virtualization software used and the physical security of the servers, and the client is responsible for the VM configuration and its associated security:

For example, as shown in the previous figure, Amazon EC2 is one of the well-known examples for IaaS. Clients can launch an EC2 instance with customized configurations, such as operating systems, associated resources (CPU, RAM, and network), IP addresses, and even the firewall rules (security groups).