Cloud Computing [closed]

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I hear the term Cloud-Computing a lot these days so i decided to google around to find out exactly what it is and whether it can benefit me.

I am struggling to find out exactly what is the difference in cloud-computing and your standard hosting of a server using a host somewhere else which is a service has existed for many years.

Is it just a fancy name for hosting?

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Cloud computing is where you are not in control of or have no way of really knowing what machines are doing your computations. Think of a service such as Amazon's EC2 or Microsoft's Azure, where you simply rent CPU cycles/space and you have no idea how it is load balanced, allocated, whether it is running on one machine or ten. This is cloud computing.

To the lay person, though, Cloud Computing is often understood as hosted somewhere on the Internet, but this is a simplification of the actual meaning of the term.

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Cloud computing refers to scalable hosting, where you can add and remove servers in real time.