The cloud comes in two flavors—public and private—and the distinction between the two is critically important. Public cloud providers sell resources such as computing cycles and storage bytes on a pay-as-you-go basis. The hardware and software that make up the platform are invisible—your team only sees a black-box abstraction that supports your applications and data. The benefits are substantial: You avoid capital investment and costly refresh cycles and gain virtually unlimited scalability, high reliability, dependable data backup, and business agility.
