DevOps Dictionary

Cloud refers to remotely accessible servers and managed services delivered over the internet for computing, storage, databases, and networking. Instead of running everything on local machines or on-premises data centres, teams provision resources on demand from a provider, typically through APIs and consoles, and pay for what they use. The cloud addresses the problem of limited capacity and slow procurement by pooling infrastructure across many customers and automating tasks like scaling (adding or removing capacity), backups, and regional redundancy (running in multiple locations for resilience).

With cloud, engineering teams can deploy and scale applications quickly, recover faster from failures, and experiment without large upfront hardware investments; without it, organisations often face longer lead times, higher operational overhead, and greater risk when demand spikes or hardware fails. This gap exists because cloud platforms standardise infrastructure and expose it as software-controlled building blocks.