Clouds in your coffee and in your interwebs? What is this weather terminology talking about? Cloud computing are web services that are common to online business applications. Usually accessed via a web browser, the software and data are stored separately and presented together in a web application.

The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams. Clouds illustrates physically the complex infrastructure that computer clusters conceal. Cloud computing is dynamically scalable and resources are provided as services through software scripts. The user pays for the resources they use. Many cloud-computing offerings have adopted the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utilities like electricity are consumed, while others are billed on a subscription basis. IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo are some of the major cloud computing service providers.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites