ELI5: What is cloud computing?

Imagine you have a big box of toys. You keep all your toys in that box in your room. That's like keeping all your computer stuff – your games, your pictures, your documents – on your own computer.

Cloud computing is like having a HUGE shared box of toys that everyone can use, and it's not even in your house! It's in a special building far away.

• Instead of keeping everything on your computer, you keep some things in that giant shared box.
• This giant box is actually a bunch of powerful computers owned by a company.
• You can get to your things in the shared box (the cloud) using the internet.

• You don't need a super powerful computer. The big computers in the cloud do all the hard work.
• You can get to your stuff from anywhere. As long as you have the internet, you can play your games or look at your pictures.
• It's like magic! You don't have to worry about fixing the big computers, the cloud company does that for you.
• More space! You don't run out of space on your computer.

Basically, the cloud is using someone else's computer (or lots of computers) over the internet to store things and do things that your own computer might not be able to do easily or at all.