Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offers the ability to only incur infrastructure costs when needed, which is great for test workloads—no need to buy a permanent piece of hardware and have it sit idle most of the time. Simply turn on virtual machines, which are computer files that behave like an actual computer, for the amount of time needed. When the virtual machines are off, payment stops.
However, most people are not used to turning virtual machines off – which means oftentimes organisations pay for more cloud service than they need. The cost of the wasted usage appears small—pennies per hour.
