What Is “the Cloud”?

"The cloud" is a response to a problem developers have been fighting for a long time. Back in the day, tech companies ran their web applications by purchasing their own hardware, setting it up in an office closet somewhere, installing their software on it, and exposing it to the internet.

This sucks for a few reasons:

• They had to purchase the hardware.
• They had to pay on-premises staff to install and maintain the hardware.
• They had to have super reliable power and internet connections.
• They had to pay for staff to build and install tools to keep the hardware (and software) online.

Virtualization

Some companies solved some of these problems by buying fewer large computers and installing software that would pretend to be many computers through virtualization.

That helped somewhat, but the cloud took the idea one step further.

The "cloud" is a collection of virtualized computers that are owned and operated by a third party, and made available to you (the web application operator) over the internet. The servers aren't physically in your office, you just rent access to them.

As they say, there is no cloud; it's just someone else's computer.

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