What is cloud computing?

Cloud computing is an IT paradigm which enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of resources such as networking, compute power, storage, applications, and services. For it to be completely ubiquitous all of these resources need to be accessible over the internet and configurable via an API.

The cloud allows companies to drastically cut on capital expenditure because they don’t have to buy their own network equipment, servers, and storage solutions anymore. Using the cloud’s business models you just pay for the resources that you actually use (pay as you go).

In the old world you had to do extensive research into the right equipment that would hopefully meet all of your demands. Then you had to order the hardware, which would take another month, and then someone had to install and configure the equipment. Provisioning a bunch of servers would easily take a few months.

Today, companies can provision a cloud server in just a few minutes and scale the amount of resources up and down as demand fluctuates. This kind of flexibility democratizes access to compute resources and allows anyone with the right idea to build it and scale it millions of users without spending a dime up-front.