Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)
Cloud computing is about hardware-based services (involving computing, network and storage capacities), where:
- Services are provided on-demand; customers can pay for them as they go, without the need to invest into a datacenter.
- Hardware management is abstracted from the customers.
- Infrastructure capacities are elastic and can easily scale up and down.
Cloud computing providers offer their services according to three fundamental models:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
- Platform as a service (PaaS),
- Software as a service (SaaS)
IaaS is the most basic and each higher model abstracts from the details of the lower models.
See more on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
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