IaaStason

IaaStason is a theoretical framework in cloud computing describing an evolution of Infrastructure as a Service that emphasizes enhanced state management and declarative orchestration across multi-cloud environments. The term combines the ideas of infrastructure provisioning with explicit, auditable state to support resilient, automated operations.

Origin and usage: The concept appears in speculative and academic discussions in the early 2020s as a way to address the disconnect between stateless IaaS primitives and workloads that require durable state, complex rollbacks, and cross-provider consistency.

Architecture and components: A typical IaaStason model includes compute and storage services delivered as APIs, a central state store for configuration and runtime data, a policy and governance layer, and an orchestration engine able to translate declarative schemas into provider-specific actions. Emphasis is placed on versioned state, observability, and security controls.

Deployment and status: IaaStason remains a theoretical or experimental construct rather than a formal standard. Proposals describe implementations using existing IaaS and container platforms, augmented with state management primitives, cross-cloud APIs, and disaster recovery features to enable consistent provisioning and failover.

Limitations and criticism: Critics point to added complexity, potential performance overhead, and the risk of vendor lock-in or fragmentation due to nonstandard state representations. The lack of formal standards and mature tooling limits practical adoption beyond research and pilot projects.

See also: Infrastructure as a Service, cloud orchestration, stateful computing, multi-cloud.