I don't know if this question is suited for superuser or not, but it doesn't seem right for Stack Overflow. Basically I have been hearing a lot about the cloud, but I don't understand what exactly it is. I am familiar with things that I am told are cloud computing, e.g. Amazon EC2, but I don't know what makes EC2 cloud computing as opposed to anything else. Is it just a matter of storing data at a remote location rather than on your own private servers that you physically own? I am not looking for a 2 sentence answer - I'm really looking for a detailed explanation of what the cloud actually is (and is not), because after watching at least ten youtube videos on this I still don't get it.
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The Cloud has come to mean just about anything out of sight, out of mind; generally with clustering (Many servers sharing the tasks / duties) and remote accessibility.
You can thing of it as a simple network flowchart:
The Cloud is not specific. It could be off-site third part hosted network solutions, or it could be a cloud based Virtual Machine farm. It could also be something like DropBox, where the "Cloud Storage" means that servers somewhere storing data, and it really doesn't matter where they are, who operates them or if the services are located physically on the same content as the rest of the service or data.
Austin T French
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