[Leaky]

Short version : It's where you use the internet instead of hard drives.

don't listen to rival, that's retarded and not correct


the cloud is just like naive said, it's a large cluster of distributed computers that are set up to run highly distributed and parallel applications, the idea being
a) you need a lot of resources to compute something, you can do it cheaper on hundreds of cheap cloud computers vs super expensive on 1 super computer
b) you need to host files with really high traffic, the cloud acts as a load balancer, they all sync the files together and you get the first available and fastest system for you
c) you have an application that can be easily broken up into a distributed system and need high availability.


the cloud does work on the same principle as the internet to have a very high uptime, basically distributing all the requests to hundreds of systems (on a good cloud maybe thousands) and automatically removing any nodes that are down from the queue so it's hard to take the cloud down because you'd have to take down every single system