Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a layer of the cloud computing stack that provides physical or virtual resources like storage and computing power to users. IaaS can be used to build, test, deploy and scale applications and databases on any device. No matter what type of application you want to build, no matter what device you need it running on, you can use IaaS to create the environment in which your application runs.
(IaaS) refers to the idea of giving cloud consumers the ability to automate and manage their data center resources through a pay-as-you-go model. where they offer storage, computing power, and networking capabilities needed only to configure the resource requirements needed, it gives you access to key data center resources, such as computing power and storage space, associated with your cloud solution. IaaS provides tools that help you manage processes through automation.
We can say it is a cloud computing infrastructure model in which virtualized hardware resources (compute, network, storage) are provisioned to customers. And it is a business model that delivers IT infrastructure like computing, storage, and network resources on a pay-as-you-go basis over the internet.
In contrast to PaaS and SaaS (even newer computing models like containers and serverless), IaaS provides the lowest-level control of resources in the cloud.
So, Infrastructure-as-a-Service commonly referred to as IaaS or simply “the cloud”, is a form of cloud computing that delivers fundamental computing, network, and storage resources to consumers on demand. Comprising both SaaS (more recently PaaS) and IaaS, this technology has gained momentum within the enterprise IT community over recent years.