Field Guide · concept

Also known as: Cloud computing, The cloud

Cloud computing is computing power and storage provided over the internet on demand, instead of from machines you own and run.1

Overview

The defining trait is elasticity: you can scale resources up when traffic spikes and back down when it fades, with near-zero upfront cost and ongoing fees for what you use. Under the hood it is virtualization at scale, run across large data centers — the same technology behind a single virtual private server, multiplied.

Trade-offs

The cloud trades capital cost for recurring fees and adds network latency compared with a local device, so it is not always the right home for low-latency or always-on tasks. It often pairs with on-site hardware in combined-tier systems: a home server captures and pre-processes locally while the cloud stores and serves the results — the model GopherTrunk fits, since the cloud cannot touch RF directly.

Sources

  1. Cloud computing — Wikipedia, on on-demand computing over the internet. ↩

See also

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