A public cloud is a cloud computing model in which a third-party provider owns and operates the infrastructure and rents it to many customers over the internet. Customers share the underlying hardware, which is isolated by virtualization and access controls, and pay for the resources they use.
Why it matters
Public clouds remove the need to buy hardware, let you start in minutes, and scale up or down with demand. Providers offer regions and availability zones, managed databases, storage and many other services. The model shifts spending from large upfront purchases to ongoing usage bills. Under the shared responsibility model, the provider secures the underlying infrastructure while the customer secures their configuration, data and access.
Example
Provider: rents virtual machines, storage, networks
Customer: launches 3 servers in one region, pays per hour
Next month: scales to 10 for a sale, then back to 3Common misconceptions
- That the public cloud means your data is publicly visible. Access is private unless you make it public.
- That the provider handles all security. Misconfigured permissions are the customer's issue.
- That it is always cheaper than owning hardware. Steady, heavy workloads may differ.
Related
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