Understanding the difference between on-premises and cloud infrastructure

As mentioned at the very beginning of this chapter, we've been solely utilizing on-premises Ubuntu installations thus far. Even if we're running Ubuntu on a virtual machine in our data center, it's still considered an on-premises installation even when it's not on physical hardware. In short, an on-premises installation is something that resides locally with us, regardless of the type of server that serves as the foundation.

The first difference when it comes to cloud computing is somewhat obvious: it's the exact opposite of a resource being on-premises. With a cloud instance of Ubuntu, it's someone else's hardware that it runs on. Most of the time, we won't know what kind of server a cloud instance is running on—when we subscribe to the services of a cloud provider and pay a fee to run a server on that platform, we're able to access the operating...