What is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) emerged in the early 2010s but still raises a lot of questions, starting from what is IaaS. Here we go through some of the IaaS basic notions and organizational principles.

What is IaaS

Generally speaking, the IaaS model offers users a complex infrastructure for running their IT solutions by means of cloud technologies. So IaaS is actually Cloud computing and virtualization techniques, making it quite affordable and effective, therefore plenty of organizations are utilizing this service.

Various systems such as servers, routers, and switchers are effectively reserved and available to the user via the internet. An example of IaaS architecture, demonstrating key system components is shown in the figure above.

IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS: what’s the difference

We briefly described IaaS above however, there are also other cloud computing service models around. In the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model, for example, developers actually rent almost everything they need to build an application. In this case, cloud providers provide development tools, infrastructure, and operating systems. PaaS turns out to be very useful in web application development. PaaS often includes middleware, development tools, database management operating systems, and infrastructure.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on its turn refers to full applications that are hosted in the cloud and maintained by the SaaS vendor. To make it clear, If a SaaS customer is like someone renting a house, then a PaaS customer is like someone renting pretty much all the needed heavy equipment and power tools to quickly build a house. If the tools and equipment were continually maintained and repaired by the owner, of course. A schematics, clarifying the IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS relation is demonstrated in the figure above.

IaaS solution: architecture example

Following [R. Modi, 2017], here we give an example of the typical architecture for IaaS virtual machine-based solution, which is demonstrated in the figure below. For example, Azure virtual machines hosting web applications, application servers, databases, and other services are provisioned using ARM templates.

Each virtual machine has a single network card with assigned public IP. They are connected with virtual networks and have a private IP from the same network. The public IP for virtual machines is optional because they are attached to a public load balancer. Operational insights agents are installed on virtual machines for monitoring purposes. PowerShell scripts are also executed on these virtual machines and downloaded from a storage account that available in another resource group in order to open relevant firewall ports, download appropriate packages, and install local certificates to allow secure access via PowerShell.

IaaS in Telematics

In the case of Telematics, a particular Telematics Platform could be deployed on IaaS. For instance, You could deploy a Navixy platform on an IaaS platform of your choice. In principle, it could be launched within minutes, providing opportunities for the independent management of cloud resources, and one could be able to continuously update Navixy instance with ease.

Further benefits could be described as follows, just to list a few:

• Ensured complete access to data: Secure unconstrained access to your GPS tracking solution by hosting it in the cloud. Choose the cloud region to meet corporate requirements. Keep your data constantly available and secure-by-design.
• Run in the cloud with IaaS provider of Your choice: Eliminate operational complexity with high-load ready cloud solutions. Choose any IaaS provider on Linux or Windows environment. Reap the benefits of innovative big data and IoT technologies.
• High return on investments: Benefit from one-time license fee and flexible costs on manageable cloud resources. Keep operational costs to a minimum. Enjoy professional support and full-featured ecosystem from Navixy.

Original publication: https://talks.navixy.com/reviews/infrastructure-as-a-service-and-telematics/