What do cloud services really do? At the risk of oversimplifying, cloud services provide users with pools of shared computer resources to be operated remotely—often by the internet. This section will describe ways in which cloud services can be characterized and typical ways in which data community often uses them.
Some cloud services are accessed through the Ethernet. These are mostly common to big companies that own one or more data centers of their own.
One very frequent way to characterize clouds is by the type of service they provide:
- Software as a Service (SaaS): Users have access to software through cloud computing. This tends to be less flexible but easier to use and understand.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS): Offers users ...
