If you've heard "the cloud" thrown around in a meeting and quietly weren't sure what it meant, this one's for you.
Here's the one-sentence version: the cloud is renting someone else's computers by the minute, instead of buying your own. That's it. The marketing makes it sound like magic. It's closer to the difference between owning a house and staying in a hotel.
It's also not new. It's the third step in a long evolution: first everyone owned their servers outright (bare metal), then they learned to split one server into many (virtualization), and then companies like Amazon started renting that out to anyone (cloud).
Each step fixed a real problem with the one before, and each one changed who pays, who waits, and who gets the 3 a.m. call when hardware dies. Once you see the three side by side, "the cloud" stops being a buzzword.
I put that comparison in one table, using the house, apartment and hotel analogy. It takes about a minute to read:
No IT background needed. Over the next few weeks I'll walk through each step, one short email at a time.
— JC
