This document provides an overview of cloud computing concepts including:
- The evolution from distributed computing to cloud computing and the key characteristics of clouds like elasticity and on-demand provisioning.
- Cloud computing architectures have three tiers - deployment models (public, private, hybrid etc.), service models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) and essential characteristics like on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling and rapid elasticity.
- Distributed systems like clusters, grids and peer-to-peer networks enabled the development of computational clouds, with virtualization making internet clouds a new computing paradigm.