In 2006, Amazon.com came up with Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) by renting out its huge data center computers to others. It helped companies to save money otherwise would have spent on expensive computers and other infrastructure products. Today the booming business of IaaS generates over $8 billion a year. Amazon holds a commanding lead in this arena accounting for more than 43 percent of the market and rivals such as Google, IBM, SAP and Microsoft are slashing prices for rent for storage and computing power.
Cloud based IaaS providers manages and delivers infrastructure including storage, networks and computing resources. Customers are able to deploy, run and control software including operating systems, applications, and enjoy limited control over networking component such as firewalls. IaaS is a standardized and highly automated service. Customers get the same help they received from their IT services. Providers including Oracle, Xen, VirtualBox, VMware and many others provide physical or virtual machines and other services. The best advantage of the service is the ability to scale service up or down according to customer needs. Customer enjoys lower bills based on utility computing basis and the bill reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.