Cloud Computing

Problem

Your company needs 100 servers for three months. Buying hardware means procurement, installation, capacity planning and then potentially owning unused machines afterward.

Solution — Cloud Computing

A provider operates large pools of infrastructure that customers consume on demand.

Need capacity
     ↓
Provision
     ↓
Use
     ↓
Release

Benefits: you provision resources quickly, scale capacity with demand, and avoid buying and maintaining physical hardware. Tradeoffs: usage and data-transfer charges can become expensive, provider outages can affect your applications, and provider-specific services can make migration harder. You still manage your data, access permissions, and the configuration you control.

Core idea: cloud computing turns computing infrastructure into an on-demand service.