Which cloud service model provides foundational infrastructure such as virtual servers and storage?

• A. IaaS
• B. PaaS
• C. SaaS
• D. DaaS

Answer: (A)

Foundational infrastructure such as virtual servers and storage is provided by Infrastructure as a Service. In this model, you rent the basic computing resources—virtual machines, persistent storage, and networking—from the cloud provider. The provider takes care of the physical hardware, virtualization layer, and data center security, while you manage and configure the operating systems, middleware, runtimes, and applications running on top of those resources. This setup gives you direct control over the software stack and the ability to scale resources up or down as needed. By contrast, Platform as a Service abstracts away the underlying OS and runtime to focus on development and deployment, Software as a Service delivers ready-to-use applications, and Desktop as a Service provides virtual desktops rather than raw infrastructure.