TECH BASICS
Cloud
Renting computing power instead of owning the machines.
The simple version
Cloud computing means running software on servers owned by someone else (like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft) and accessed over the internet, instead of on a computer sitting in your own office.
For example
Instead of buying and maintaining its own servers, a startup can rent exactly the computing power it needs from a cloud provider — and scale up or down in minutes as demand changes.
Go deeper
The three biggest cloud providers — AWS (Amazon), Azure (Microsoft), and Google Cloud — power a huge share of the internet's apps and websites. "Cloud Engineer" is now a full career specialty built around managing this.
Why it matters
Nearly every modern tech company runs "in the cloud" — understanding the term helps you read job descriptions, category tags, and product pitches without getting stuck on jargon.