Cloud computing is about hardware-based services (involving computing, network and storage capacities), where:
- Services are provided on-demand; customers can pay for them as they go, without the need to invest into a datacenter.
- Hardware management is abstracted from the customers.
- Infrastructure capacities are elastic and can easily scale up and down.
There is a powerful economic force behind this simple model: providing and consuming cloud computing services generally allows to have far more efficient resource utilization, compared to self-hosting and data center type of hosting.
Snippet from this article on cloud computing.
