Private vs. hybrid vs. public and IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. Here’s my primer on how to start figuring out what’s what with clouds.
First, you do get that a cloud is not just a bunch of servers, right? To refresh your memory, the key difference for users is that cloud computing services are delivered as a utility. Got it? Good.
Moving on, there are three basic ways clouds are presented to users. These are public, private, and hybrid. If anyone can access a cloud service simply by using a credit card or for free — for example, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Office 365, Dropbox file storage, or Amazon Web Services (AWS) — then it’s a public cloud.