What is Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)?

In layman's terms, the easiest way to describe IaaS is by using the pizza as a service analogy. We're not sure who created this graphic, but we'll provide credit if we can find them!

Think of the pizza dough, tomato sauce, toppings, and cheese as your operating system and applications - whether that's Windows, Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, PHP, Apache, Tomcat, IIS, etc. How you "make" and manage your pizza is up to you. We provide you the oven, drinks, gas, etc. to cook your pizza and enjoy your pizza. That is the "infrastructure" - the data center, the network, IP addresses, bandwidth, power, cooling, etc.

To bring this back to the tech world, we provide the data center, rack, server hardware, network, bandwidth, power, cooling, etc. and then you bring the OS and other software, and make your application on that.