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Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan
Can someone explain to me in simple language for a non tech guy like me what exactly is a cloud computing product?
Is it just data storage on a cloud?
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It's more than that. It's basically anything computer hardware can do, virtualized* on someone else's hardware. So say a company like Uber(making this up) ran everything in the Amazon cloud. You use their app on your phone, which talks to their virtual servers running on Amazon hardware. They would have a software defined firewall and routing in between your app and their virtual servers. They may run their entire network virtually, meaning they don't need their own hardware. They have virtual servers running everything they would normally run in their own office. Maybe they don't even have desktops, and everyone's Windows install is also virtual, which users can remote connect to from home. So it's a lot more than just data storage.
*A virtual machine is just the operating system running in a container that can use resources from hardware that it doesn't care what it is. So you allocate resources from the main physical servers that Amazon(Or MS Azure, or whoever else) runs and those resources can be shared across many virtual machines, and dynamically allocated on the fly. This makes load spikes easier to deal with, because you can do it instantly, rather than buying new hardware, setting it up etc. It also means you can setup a company in the cloud quickly with monthly costs, rather than large hardware expenses.