What are the main use cases for IaaS?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is primarily used to provide scalable, on-demand computing resources over the internet. Its main use cases include hosting applications, managing variable workloads, and supporting development environments. By abstracting physical hardware, IaaS allows developers to focus on deploying and managing software without worrying about maintaining servers, storage, or networking equipment. Providers like AWS EC2, Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, and Google Compute Engine offer virtual machines, storage, and networking tools that can be provisioned in minutes. This flexibility makes IaaS a foundational solution for many technical teams.

One key use case for IaaS is hosting web applications or services that require scalability. For example, an e-commerce platform might experience traffic spikes during holiday sales. Using IaaS, developers can automatically scale server capacity up or down based on demand, ensuring consistent performance without overprovisioning resources. Load balancers and auto-scaling groups (like AWS Auto Scaling) integrate with IaaS platforms to handle traffic distribution and resource allocation. Teams can also deploy redundant instances across multiple geographic regions to improve fault tolerance. This approach is cost-effective because you only pay for the compute and storage resources you actively use, avoiding upfront hardware investments.

Another common use case is creating isolated development and testing environments. Developers can quickly spin up temporary virtual machines (VMs) to test new features, experiment with configurations, or replicate production issues without affecting live systems. For instance, a team might use Azure VMs to run a staging environment that mirrors their production setup, allowing them to validate code changes safely. IaaS also supports CI/CD pipelines by providing ephemeral environments for automated testing. After testing, these VMs can be deleted to minimize costs. This is particularly useful for projects requiring multiple parallel environments, such as testing software across different operating systems or dependency versions.

Finally, IaaS is widely used for data-intensive workloads like big data processing or machine learning. Tasks such as training AI models or analyzing large datasets often require significant computational power, which IaaS can provide on demand. For example, a data engineering team might deploy a Hadoop cluster on Google Compute Engine to process terabytes of log data, then shut it down once the job completes. GPU-enabled instances (like AWS EC2 P3 instances) are often used for machine learning tasks due to their high-performance capabilities. IaaS also simplifies storage management for large datasets, with services like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage offering scalable, durable object storage. This eliminates the need for organizations to maintain expensive on-premises infrastructure for sporadic high-compute needs.