In an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, the provider offers virtualized computing resources such as servers, storage, and network over the internet. The user can provision and manage these resources according to their needs. One of the common ways to provision a new Linux computing instance in an IaaS cloud is to use a pre-prepared image of a Linux distribution provided by the cloud hosting organization. An image is a snapshot of a virtual machine that contains the operating system and other software components. The user can choose from a variety of images that suit their requirements and launch a new instance from the image. This way, the user does not have to install and configure the Linux operating system from scratch, which saves time and effort. Some examples of cloud hosting organizations that provide pre-prepared images of popular Linux distributions are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and DigitalOcean. References: Linux Essentials - Topic 108: Cloud Computing and Linux Essentials - Topic 108: Cloud Computing - Exam Objectives