The cloud is a nebulous term. Everyone seems to be talking about this cloud where you can store files, listen to music, and receive computing power from.  And even scarier, everyone is moving into that cloud and wanting you to come along!

But what is cloud computing exactly? Why is it so attractive to people? What can you experience?

The cloud is simply a large pool of physical servers, located elsewhere, that can power a website or store information.  Instead of having all of your power confined to onsite servers, you simply receive all of your resources from a giant server pool offsite.  This giant server pool is called “a cloud.”

People are attracted to the cloud because it contains a potentially unlimited amount of computing power on demand.  If your website receives a large, sudden amount of traffic, you can order more power from “the cloud” and meet those traffic demands almost instantaneously.  This ability of being able to handle any sort of traffic situation is called, “scalability” and “instant.”  Some other buzz words associated with cloud computing.

Cloud computing is also much more cost-effective.  Instead of paying for the bills of having physical servers onsite, a large IT team taking care of those servers, and paying for power that isn’t even used, you pay for what you want and use.  Computing power becomes just like a utility, like electricity or heat.

Many large companies have switched to cloud computing because of these three advantages.  Netflix switched to cloud computing in order to handle all the streaming on its site.  Google utilizes the virtually unlimited amount power to handle the loads of information it has to sort through and store.  Amazon, Groupon, SalesFoce.com all use cloud computing to make shopping for millions around the world run smoother.   Many of these companies even attribute their enormous success to cloud computing.