Well, if you have ever owned a smart phone, you've obviously heard of the "cloud". iPhone users can not stop boasting about their famous iCloud and Android users can tell you more about the indispensable benefits of Google Drive or Gmail. However, not everyone who uses a smart phone can give an answer to this seemingly simple question: WHAT IS THE CLOUD?

In this brief article, I will attempt to give the most simplest answer to this question. While some of you define the cloud as the internet, referring to all the things that you can access remotely over the internet, I will, in simple words, define the "cloud" as someone else's computer that you are utilising in some fashion by accessing it over the internet. When something is in the cloud, it means that it is stored on some servers/computers somewhere in the world instead of your computer's hard drive. This is a physical server/computer.

With this in mind, we can now try to define Cloud Computing. AWS defines Cloud computing as the on-demand delivery of IT resources such as compute, databases, and storage via the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Please check out this YouTube video from the AWS Official YouTube channel.

Basically Cloud Computing refers to any kind of hosted service delivered over the internet. These services often include servers, databases, software, networks, analytics and other computing functions that can be operated through the cloud.

Next article covers Cloud Computing Service Types.