This picture is an abstract representation of cloud computing a technology that is very concrete but at the same time not clearly defined and the question “what is cloud computing?” usually lead to different answers from different people.

Clouds Computing refers to a set of technologies that provides the possibility to share or outsource storage space and computational power. Traditional developments in these technologies have concentrated on providing batch access to distributed computational and storage resources.

In other words, cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases and a broad set of application services over the Internet. A Cloud services platform owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services, while you provision and use what you need via a web application.

However, the desire to access, control, and acquire data from pervasive, widely-networked and distributed instruments reflects the need to include such embedded systems as sensors and probes in the Cloud world.

For more information you can have a look at the Wikipedia page of cloud computing.

Here you can find a set of popular cloud providers:

This article in Wikipedia try to list a set of cloud provider

Cloud Computing has originated from Grid Computing a technology that aim to federate the computational resources of labs across the world in order to provide the abstraction of a massive supercomputer for loosely couple tasks.

If you find this technology interesting and this trigger your curiosity just drop me a line! I will be curious to know more.