The Cloud is someone else’s computer

At its most simple, when you use the cloud you are using someone else’s computer to do whatever it is you are trying to do.

When you backup your data to the cloud you are storing your data on the cloud provider’s storage drives. Your data is moving through their physical computer servers inside of their data centers.

When you use a cloud-based application that you access from your web browser, you are borrowing the cloud provider’s CPU and RAM resources to do the work you are doing in the cloud-based application instead of using your own computer’s resources.

The Cloud is like a modern mainframe

You may know about mainframes from the earlier days of computing. If not, that is no problem!

Mainframes were very large computer systems that were shared among groups of users. Each user was allocated a specific amount of time to use the mainframe to run programs and do work. When a user’s turn was over, that user had to wait for another turn to use the mainframe.

Early computing equipment was so expensive and difficult to maintain that this was the only way many organizations could afford computing resources.

The Cloud operates in many of the same ways that mainframes operate. Individual users pay for the ability to use the cloud operator’s computing resources for set amounts of time. Computing technology, fortunately, has gotten so much faster and better that you cannot really notice when it is someone else’s turn to use the cloud’s resources in most cases.

Like with mainframes, however, users pay to use the cloud because building their own computing system is usually too difficult or expensive.

There is no “The Cloud”

There is not actually a physical thing that is “The Cloud”. A cloud is essentially what you get when you hook up multiple computers in such a way that users can use and release computing resources on demand, generally in an automated fashion.

At its core, a cloud is just computers. That is, of course, a pretty strong simplification, and there are differences between the kinds of computers that make up a cloud and the kinds of computers that sit on users’ desktops. One of the most important things to remember about the cloud is that it is just another way to solve the same kinds of problems people have used technology to solve for years: how do I get this particular job done?