"Running your stuff on other people's hardware…"
The cloud is a frequently used term in modern day tech lingo and often misunderstood by many. The cloud is as simple as the quote above, the outsourcing of the hardware (the capability of your computer) to an offsite provider which you connect to via the internet.
These clouds may be private, often seen in universities when hosting individual students online workspace, or public, the more often used version and what we’ll be focussing on as it includes Azure.
Whilst Cloud computing can be anywhere in the world, as long as it’s connected to the internet. However, typically you will connect to the nearest data centre. For the UK that would be UK South (London) and UK West (Cardiff). By connecting to your nearest data centre you reduce the latency and ensure your data never leaves your country of research.
In our section on virtual machines (VMs) we'll go into more detail into how virtualising computer hardware works in practice.
