The cloud helps you do things you cannot do with plain hardware

The cloud’s greatest strength is perhaps its flexiblity compared to plain server hardware. When you use a cloud configuration you combine your physical server hardware together into a single pool of resources. This means that you can draw resources from the cloud without having to worry about what physical server the cloud is on.

You can create the resources when you need them and release them when you are done with your work. Many cloud service providers only charge you for the resources you use while you are using them, in fact. This flexibility helps many developers who cannot afford to buy their own physical server hardware.

Depending on your cloud software, you can even migrate your resources from one physical machine to another without any disruption to your work if you have a physical machine that is overloaded or has a hardware problem that has to be resolved.

The cloud helps you get more use out of your hardware

One of the biggest advantages to the cloud is squeezing out more use from your physical server hardware. Most physical server hardware actually sits there doing nothing much of the time. A single physical server usually does a single job or the work for a single person or team for security and privacy purposes. The hardware is also often more powerful than whatever work is being done on the hardware. All this extra capacity sitting unused is wasted.

Most cloud software uses isolated virtual environments to give users CPU, RAM, and storage resources. These virtual environments are functionally almost identical to full physical servers; they are called virtual machines, virtual private servers, or something similar to virtual servers. With your hardware configured as a cloud, you can create the isolated virtual environments for your users’ workloads.

Since most servers, either physical or virtual, are not doing any work most of the time, you can use the cloud to create multiple virtual environments on the same physical server hardware. If you can fit more workloads on the same machine, you can ultimately get more value out of a single physical machine than if you could run one workload on it - you will not need to buy more physical machines as soon.

The cloud has plenty of advantages. These are just the beginning

Cloud technology has revolutionized computing. Clouds have so much more functionality than standalone physical machines. While flexibility and efficiency are some of the biggest advantages to the cloud, most cloud platforms also provide automation, self-service functionality, high availability, data redundancy, and other advanced technology to help technologists create, deploy, and manage software on the cloud.