A consultant is helping a large company migrate its development environment to a public cloud provider. The developers are working on a VDI solution. The development tools that employees utilize…

SaaS provides a fully managed application with no OS-level access, making it incompatible with environments that require control over the operating system.

PaaS abstracts both the OS and runtime, restricting customers to application code and data management - not suitable when OS-level configuration is required.

Bare metal service provides direct hardware access without a hypervisor, which is more control than needed for VDI and sacrifices the flexibility and rapid provisioning that IaaS virtual machines offer for a development environment.

IaaS delivers virtualized compute, storage, and networking while leaving OS management entirely to the customer, which is required when VDI tooling depends on custom drivers, kernel parameters, or specific OS configurations that a platform layer would abstract away. The cloud provider manages only the physical hardware and hypervisor, giving the development team the granular OS control they need. This makes IaaS the standard choice for VDI deployments requiring deep OS customization.