Not all clouds operate on the same business model. Some of the largest cloud services operate as clouds for which anyone can sign up and provision cloud resources. These clouds operate on a public cloud model - they are open to the public for anyone to use as long as they want.
Public clouds are available for everyone to use
Whereas some clouds are for individual teams or companies to run their workloads, public clouds make their resources available for everyone. Anyone with a credit card can sign up for an account on a public cloud for the most part and start provisioning cloud resources.
Public clouds are not for any particular person or use case
In many cases public clouds are meant for general purpose cloud computing. They are not meant to be limited to a single team’s workloads or a single company’s employees. Some smaller public cloud providers do narrow their platforms to focus on particular niches or segments of the market.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are the largest public clouds
The largest public cloud providers are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. There are other public clouds like Oracle’s cloud, IBM’s cloud, and international providers’ clouds like Open Telekom Cloud in the EU or Alibaba Cloud in China. Public clouds are often the largest cloud deployments on the entire planet; they aim to service the cloud market at large.