Cloud computing is the process of using remote resources to complete tasks that you would normally do on a local computer or server. This includes data storage, analytics, database management, software hosting, and many other services. The primary advantage of cloud computing is its ability to scale as customers need it. Most cloud computing takes place in large data centers, each of which has tens of thousands of servers for people to access. With cloud computing, it is possible to add and remove servers to a system as needed to handle the workload, thus freeing the user from needing to buy and maintain each of them separately. You can do cloud computing through private machines that run nothing else, but many operations use shared machines to help distribute the load more effectively.