i first heard of cloud computing only this year when i attended sun tech days in manila, and it easily got my attention. they say cloud computing in fact represented the internet (the cloud) in our network designs, mainly because what happens inside the cloud is abstracted to us the developers. the important thing is that data is sent through the cloud and we receive responses.

truth the matter is that there are many components here – like pipes, routers, servers, services etc.. cloud computing can be compared also to distributed computing, with these main differences:
– cloud computing self-heals
– cloud computing self-monitors
– cloud computing registers resources
– cloud computing automatically reconfigures

i’ll leave the technical details for you to search in the clouds.

but if you wanted to understand it more in plain english: