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IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

SFBy Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business School·Updated 13 September 2026· About this site

Rented virtual machines, storage and networks that you configure and run yourself.

The provider owns the data centre, hardware and virtualisation layer; you pick the operating system and install, patch and secure everything above it. Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Azure Virtual Machines and Google Compute Engine are IaaS. It is the layer with the most control, and the most chores: an unpatched virtual machine is your security hole, and a forgotten one keeps costing money.

# IaaS: rent a bare virtual machine; its operating system is now yours to patch
aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id YOUR_IMAGE_ID \
  --instance-type t3.micro \
  --count 1
# It bills until you terminate it: aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids YOUR_INSTANCE_ID