Infrastructure as a Service

ABSTRACT

In recent years cloud computing has emerged as the most promising paradigm for software and services delivery companies. Enterprise clients are demanding an entirely new class of service from their vendors, services that do what traditional products have been doing but in a distributed, all accessible, and cost efficient manner. This has put the pressure on firms to step up their offerings to be relevant.

There are many models of cloud computing categorized on the depth of services offered. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the basic model of the Cloud Computing paradigm. An IaaS provides access to computing resource in a virtualized environment which can be used to create cost effective and easily scalable IT solutions.

This paper discusses the need to have an In-house custom IaaS solution ready, the difficulties that one might face in developing one and the features that such a solution must have, from the point of view of a large technology services firm.

Why IaaS Is Important

Cloud Platforms can be “private” – clouds which are organization owned with restricted access; or they can be “public” - clouds which are consumer oriented products (the consumers here being other organizations).

The current major players in the “public” sector are Amazon Web Services, Heroku (owned by SalesForce), Azure (Microsoft’s Offering), and RackSpace etc to name a few. These are excellent options for consumer oriented projects with low initial funding that can’t go through the time consuming and monetary hassle of managing their own hardware setup. To give an idea of the ubiquity of these services, when you sign up for the Facebook developer program it gives you an option to use Heroku as you default hosting provider with a clear detailed tutorial on how to get your application running in no time using that platform. It is tie ups like these that have cemented the position of these services.

Most of these IaaS offerings are built using off the shelf...