Introduction to the cloud

For the cloud, we're all in.

– Steve Ballmer

At our core, Microsoft is the productivity and platform company for the mobile-first and cloud-first world.

– Satya Nadella

These two quotes from the former and current Microsoft CEO highlight the importance of the cloud. The cloud has been one of the hottest buzzwords over the last few years but you shouldn't be surprised to know that we have been using the cloud for a decade, maybe more, without realizing it. Gmail, Facebook, Skype, Dropbox, OneDrive, and so on are all examples of cloud solutions that we use almost everyday.

Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the internet. Cloud computing relies on the sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economy of scale, similar to a utility. Clouds enable organizations to focus...