Cloud computing has two meanings. The most common refers to running workloads remotely over the internet in a commercial provider's data center, also known as the "public cloud" model. Popular public cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce's CRM system, and Microsoft Azure all exemplify this familiar notion of cloud computing. Today, most businesses take a multicloud approach, which simply means they use more than one public cloud service.
The second meaning of cloud computing describes how it works: a virtualized pool of resources, from raw compute power to application functionality, available on demand. When customers procure cloud services, the provider fulfills those requests using advanced automation rather than manual provisioning. The key advantage is agility: the ability to apply abstracted compute, storage, and network resources to workloads as needed and tap into an abundance of prebuilt services.o
