[Note: this blog was originally published on cloudecoystem.com]

Cloud Computing. Just two simple words, right? Yet, many in the IT industry have argued about their meaning for several years. The good news is that the majority seem to agree that cloud computing includes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS).

Of course each of those core components of cloud computing can be broken down further. Let’s take a closer look at how IaaS has evolved into an entire ecosystem of services along with a vast range of “enabling” products and tools.

Infrastructure Services

Public, private and hybrid cloud environments may be the most talked about elements of the IaaS ecosystem. After all, public, private and hybrid clouds are ultimately what deliver infrastructure services.

But what about the IaaS products and tools used to build and manage public, private and hybrid clouds? I like to refer to those as cloud–enabling solutions. They don’t deliver cloud services directly. However, IaaS offerings would not exist and would not be usable without them.

Cloud-Enabling Solutions

On the surface, cloud-enabling solutions may sound just like existing IT categories such as “infrastructure.”  Yet, after closer inspection, it is clear that each category offers capabilities tuned specifically to cloud computing. Here are some of the top categories used to enable IaaS solutions:

  • Infrastructure: Traditional IT infrastructure includes servers, storage and network hardware. But when it comes to the IaaS ecosystem, each of these components has evolved. Cloud servers may be low-priced commodity boxes or perhaps have low TCO through reduced power consumption. Network devices are increasingly virtualized with everything from application delivery controllers to firewalls available as a virtual appliance.
  • Platforms: These are typically software platforms used to establish and run IaaS environments. OpenStack and CloudStack are popular open source offerings here and there are another 20 or so commercial platforms for building private and public IaaS clouds.
  • Management: This category at least partially mirrors the traditional IT management tools, including monitoring, fault management, change and configuration management, and application provisioning. However, those managing cloud environments often use a new breed of tools specifically tuned for cloud computing. Many of these new tools even leverage the APIs and built-in management services offered by IaaS clouds.
  • Application onboarding: This is essentially a new category for the IaaS world. Most traditional applications were not designed to run in cloud environments. So application onboarding tools help automate the process of onboarding those applications. Sometimes they even provide runtime support to increase performance and reliability while running in an IaaS cloud.
  • Billing & payment services: Unlike nearly any enterprise delivered IT service, public cloud services are delivered for a profit. A variety of new billing and payment services are springing up to help public cloud providers monetize the services they deliver. This is more complex than what traditional hosting providers have dealt with due to hourly billing models.

Conclusions

As the cloud computing industry matures, we aren’t just seeing new categories of services such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.  And we aren’t just seeing public, private and hybrid clouds within the IaaS segment. We’re also seeing an entire ecosystem of enabling technologies emerge.

Do you see any other elements of the IaaS ecosystem emerging?  Do you think there are still some significant gaps in the IaaS ecosystem?

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