Running a product on infrastructure rented from a provider such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Hetzner, instead of owning servers. Capacity, storage, and managed services are provisioned on demand and billed by usage.
Cloud removes the upfront cost and the hardware risk, and gives small teams access to databases, queues, and CDNs that used to require a dedicated operations department. Unchecked, it also produces surprising bills.
We choose the provider by workload and budget rather than by habit, use managed services where they save real maintenance time, and set up cost alerts and resource limits from the start.