Cloud computing

How it is used

The umbrella term for the whole field. In daily talk people simply say 'the cloud': 'we moved to the cloud', 'it runs in the cloud'. The formal 'cloud computing' appears in job titles, courses, reports and contracts.

Example sentences

1. Cloud computing lets a small startup launch in a week without buying a single server.

2. Our company started its move to cloud computing three years ago, and the old data center closes next month.

Common collocations

• move to the cloud
• cloud computing platform
• cloud migration
• in the cloud
• cloud-based service

Related terms

• cloud providerA company that owns large data centers and rents computing, storage, networking and other services to customers over the internet.
• IaaSShort for infrastructure as a service: renting basic building blocks such as virtual machines, disks and networks, while you manage the operating system and everything above it.
• PaaSShort for platform as a service: a ready-made platform where you only upload your code, and the provider runs the servers, operating system and runtime for you.
• SaaSShort for software as a service: complete software that customers use through a browser or app and pay for by subscription, while the vendor runs everything behind it.
• on-premisesDescribes servers and software that a company runs in its own building or data center, rather than renting them from a cloud provider.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• cloud computing · Software Engineering

More terms: Cloud Basics and Service Models

• region
• serverless
• hybrid cloud
• availability zone
• workload
• managed service