Life in Cloud City

At any rate, the future of computer networking is rapidly heading for the clouds. Cloud computing, to be specific. This chapter provides a brief introduction to cloud computing. “The cloud” represents a new way of handling common computer tasks. Following are just a few examples of how the cloud way differs from the traditional way: email services, disk storage, accounting services, and virtual servers. Three distinct kinds of services can be provided via the cloud: applications, platforms, and services. The chapter describes these three types of cloud services in greater detail. The most common form of cloud computing uses what is known as a public cloud — that is, cloud services that are available to anyone in the world via the Internet. A private cloud mimics many of the features of cloud computing but is implemented on a private hardware within a local network, so it isn't accessible to the general public.