1.1 What the cloud actually is
You can explain cloud computing to a non-technical person without saying 'someone else's computer' and stopping there.
Before:00. Groundwork — Linux, Networking & GitUnlocks:02. Compute09. Cost Engineering
Cloud computing has a real definition — on-demand self-service, pooled resources, elasticity, measured billing — and this topic replaces the shrug of somebody else's computer with it. It opens the foundations module because every later judgement leans on these characteristics. The honest half of the topic is what did not change: hardware still exists, still fails, and still sits in a building somewhere; what changed is who carries the capital cost and how fast you can get more. The common confusion is treating cloud as automatically cheaper — it is faster and more flexible, and cheaper only when managed.
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On-demand self-service, pooling, elasticity, measured service
Four properties separate cloud computing from renting a server: you provision it yourself, resources are pooled, capacity grows and shrinks, and usage is metered. A service missing any of them is something else with a fashionable name.
What changed: capital expense becomes operating expense
The shift is financial as much as technical: paying monthly for what you use instead of buying hardware up front changes who can start a company. It also changes what happens when nobody is watching the meter.
What did not change: someone still runs hardware, and it still fails
Underneath the abstraction there is still a machine in a building, and it still catches fire, loses power and fails. Every reliability decision later in this subject exists because this remains true.
The honest list of what cloud is bad at
The honest list of what the cloud handles badly matters more than the list of virtues, because the virtues are in every advertisement. Steady predictable workloads, tight latency to fixed hardware, and data you cannot move are the usual entries.
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