Infrastructure as a Service

As the name suggests, IaaS are infrastructure services provided by a cloud provider. This service includes the physical hardware and its configuration, network hardware and its configuration, storage hardware and its configuration, load balancers, compute, and virtualization. Any layer above virtualization is the responsibility of the consumer. The consumer can decide to use the provided underlying infrastructure in whatever way best suits their requirements. For example, consumers can consume the storage, network, and virtualization to provision virtual machines on top of it. It is then the consumer's responsibility to manage and control the virtual machines and the software deployed within it.