DevOps Dictionary

Cloud is the use of remotely accessible servers and managed services delivered over the internet for compute, storage, databases, and networking. It addresses the limits of on-premises infrastructure by letting teams provision capacity on demand from a provider, typically through a web console or APIs, and pay only for what they use. At a high level, cloud platforms pool hardware across many customers and expose it as software-controlled building blocks, while automating operational tasks such as scaling (adding or removing capacity), backups, patching, and multi-region redundancy for resilience.

With cloud, teams can ship and scale applications quickly, recover faster from failures, and run experiments without major upfront hardware purchases; without it, provisioning is slower, capacity planning is riskier, and outages or traffic spikes can lead to longer downtime and higher operational overhead. This gap exists because cloud turns infrastructure into programmable services that can be created, changed, and monitored consistently.