Answer Description

Your CIO is looking for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This model aims to automate the provisioning and creation of infrastructure like physical servers, networks and virtual machines. Most commonly an IaaS vendor will provide a virtual machine with a pre-installed operating system and provide access to you to configure based on your needs.

Wikipedia

Introduced in 2012 by Oracle, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are hosted in a public, private, or hybrid cloud. It provides you with high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like backup, data partitioning, scaling, security, physical computing resources, etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines as well as the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. Overview Typically IaaS involves the use of a cloud orchestration technology like OpenStack, Apache CloudStack or OpenNebula. It manages the creation of a virtual machine and decides on the hypervisor (i.e. physical host) in order to start it whilst enabling VM migration features between hosts, allocates storage volumes, & attaches them to VMs that track usage information for billing and more. An alternative to hypervisors is Linux containers, which run in isolated partitions of a single Linux kernel running directly on the physical hardware. Linux cgroups and namespaces are the underlying Linux kernel technologies used to isolate, secure and manage the containers. Containerisation offers higher performance than virtualization because there is no hypervisor overhead. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk-image library, raw block storage, file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software