Only 2% of all virtual machines (VMs) were delivered through public cloud providers in 2009 and 2010. By 2011, about 3% of all VMs were running within public IaaS cloud providers. The number of VMs in public cloud have grown by a factor of nearly twenty since then.

Although it is not unusual for large chunks of VM capacity that is being paid for to go unused or underutilized, the public cloud IaaS is far larger now than its on-premise private counterpart.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS basically includes provisioning processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources. The consumers of these resources do not have to manage and control the underlying cloud physical infrastructure. They just control operating systems, storage, deployed application and possibly, in a limited way, of selective networking components. The essential characteristics of IaaS are:

• On-demand self-service
• Broad network access
• Resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Measured Service

Why is IaaS valued so much?

1. Immediacy of resources

The time taken from when a request for a server is generated and the availability of that server can be reduced to seconds or minutes in case of an IaaS environment. So, instead of waiting for hours or days, or in some cases weeks, for in-house machine resources to become available, developers can begin their projects sooner. Hundreds of VMs, when combined, can be provisioned across multiple geographical locations. Most of the major cloud providers possess robust APIs that allow easy leverage on the advantages of IaaS.

1. Pay for what is being used

It is not necessary that all applications are running all the time. But many in-house options make it compulsory for businesses to pay for the machine whether or not it is being used for the whole time. The IaaS offerings allow businesses to pay only for the times when VM resources are being used.

1. Reduction in spending by right-sizing machines

In most of the projects, generously sized machines with their native application utilize only about 10% of system resources. Public cloud IaaS offers businesses an opportunity to resize their VMs or scale out flexibly according to the demand. This prevents unnecessary spending on additional resources.

1. No need to purchase for the future with on-demand scalability

The above advantages practically eliminate the need to purchase resources in advance for expected spikes in performance such as periods of peak-time traffic. The resources can be added when needed by scaling vertically (adding more hardware resources) or horizontally (adding similar machines or duplicating existing machines). When the peak hours have passed, resources can be scaled down to save money. This process can also be automated with APIs.

The above mentioned points clearly show why public cloud IaaS has been on the rise. Organizations across the globe are now turning towards public cloud offerings instead of private cloud. But that being said, there are some scenarios where private clouds are required. Most others however, can do with public clouds.

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