Cloud computing is the practice of taking on-premise workloads and moving them to a managed self-service data center. These data centers could either be a public cloud, or an internal self-hosted private cloud using something like OpenStack.
The Cloud Offerings might look different depending on which public cloud provider you are utilising, but most have two things in common:
- The hardware, and sometimes even the OS:s, is abstracted away from the consumer.
- Resources are metered and billing occur on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Most cloud providers also offer some kind of service as Infrastructure as a Service, like Virtual Machines or even dedicated hardware.