The most common implementation models are presented next.
In a public cloud, the applications and services are hosted on a public cloud platform. The systems and services are easily accessible to the general public; for example, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Salesforce, and so on:
Benefits of the public cloud include the following:
- Economical scale: The public cloud is cost-effective by sharing the same resources with a large number of consumers
- Reliability: The public cloud maintains replicas at different locations; they serve for redundancy in case of failover, providing a high level of reliability
- Elastic scalability: The public cloud can be flexibly scaled up or down, depending on demand from a pool of resources
- Flexibility: Many options to choose among vendors, and also to integrate the public cloud with the private cloud and so on, are available
- Pay per use: This feature enables that resources are accessible whenever a consumer needs them