Welcome to our section on Cloud computing.
There is a humorous statement that “There is no such thing as the Cloud, it’s just somebody else’s computer”. It’s not actually in the air somewhere, but the the point is that it is a computer somewhere, and everybody with an internet connection can get to it, but you don’t actually care where it is. As a matter of fact, many cloud computing centers are underground.
When I worked at SAS Institute they went from software as a product that you leased an annual license to install their software on your computer. It worked that way for over 40 years. With the advent of cloud computing they introduced SAS Viya which was a cloud hosted version of their software with a very new architecture. When I was at our North Carolina headquarters and was walking around campus I encountered a somewhat out of place hill in a grassy field. On one side of it there was a large steel door leading under the hill into the SAS Cloud Computing Center.
Wikipedia has a great page on Cloud computing. However, it is extremely overwhelming as an introduction to the subject. It is a great reference, but don’t read it very far. This section of our site will introduce it to you gently.