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Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing refers to a model where computing services are provided to the user via the internet on remote hardware - a "cloud", where the user needs no knowledge on the low-level (e.g. host-operating-system- or hardware-level) service implementation. Depending on the abstraction level, these services are mostly categorized into Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Containers-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Function-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, CaaS, PaaS, FaaS, SaaS) offerings. An IaaS cloud can offer, for example, virtual machines (working like hardware computers), while a FaaS offering would, for example, consist of an endpoint which receives the argument of a computationally costly mathematical function and returns the function's result. An AI inference service, which gives back a result from a model based on user input (argument), is a typical example matching the FaaS scheme. SaaS offerings normally offer a web application directly. Through a clear abstraction and interfacing concepts, cloud providers can tune their lower-layer systems and offer scalable, on-demand computing and storage resources. Users pay for resource consumption based on their needs and contracts. This model enables organizations to allocate and leverage powerful IT resources adhoc and without the need for upfront investments in hardware, reducing infrastructure costs and simplifying management.

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