The Case for Cloud Computing

To understand clouds and cloud computing, we must first understand the two different types of clouds. The author distinguishes between clouds that provide on-demand computing instances and those that provide on-demand computing capacity. Cloud computing doesn't yet have a standard definition, but a good working description of it is to say that clouds, or clusters of distributed computers, provide on-demand resources and services over a network, usually the Internet, with the scale and reliability of a data center.