Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud

Cloud computing delivers computing resources (servers, storage, networks, and software) over the internet, on demand, and paid by use. Instead of buying and racking your own hardware, you rent capacity from a provider and scale it up or down in minutes.

The big benefit is elasticity: pay for what you use, grow instantly when demand spikes, and shrink when it drops.

In a public cloud, a provider like AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud owns the data centers and rents shared resources to many customers, called tenants. Your workloads run on the provider hardware alongside other customers, kept isolated by virtualization.

Public cloud offers low upfront cost, near-infinite scale, and global reach, but you give up some control and depend on the provider security and uptime.