"The cloud" sounds like magic and floats above explanation. This chapter brings it back down to earth: it's computers you don't own, sitting in real buildings, that you reach over the internet — and once you see that, the whole word stops being mysterious.
4 topics
By now you've followed a website all the way from your power button to a page on your screen, and you've seen that the website lives on a server — a computer kept running in a data center somewhere far away. "The cloud" is just the next step out: not one such computer, but warehouses full of them, owned by a few big companies, and rented out to everyone else.
This chapter does one job — it strips the mystery off that word. Four topics take it apart: what the cloud actually is, why companies rent computers instead of buying their own, what's on the rental menu, and where this course hands you off to the cloud courses that come next.