VPS and infrastructure-as-a-service IaaS, what is the difference?

Question

I am Java developer, from my point of view, VPS and infrastructure-as-a-service IaaS is the same, both offer me virtual machine to built what ever applications stack I want, is this right or I am missing something here?

Answer 1

A VPS is a component of an IaaS solution. An IaaS provider might also offer DNS utilities which help you host web servers, traffic shaping and bandwidth capabilities, insight into the performance of your servers, firewalls, etc.

At its core though, an IaaS consists of a VPS. However, many major providers are moving towards PaaS which offers the capability to scale up or down VPS's on demand and can abstract away key pieces of hardware & software. For example, Google app engine abstracts away the entire OS and just hosts your web service.