Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model where an organization outsources the equipment used to support storage, hardware, servers and networking components. A typical IaaS offers scalability which is particularly useful for workloads that are highly volatile. IaaS also offers utility style costing, location independence, no single point of failure, and physical security of data centre locations. The advantages are so great, IaaS is the fastest growing area of cloud computing.
This article showcases the finest open source projects that provide a key alternative for those who wish to avoid using a commercially provided cloud.