Cloud computing means renting computing power, storage, and other infrastructure from a provider’s remote data centers instead of buying and maintaining your own physical servers. It’s usually broken into layers: infrastructure-as-a-service (raw servers and storage you configure yourself), platform-as-a-service (a managed environment for running your own code), and software-as-a-service (fully finished applications) — most startups use a mix of the first two to run their own product.

For founders, the cloud is what makes it possible to launch a global-capable product with a small team and no upfront hardware investment: you pay only for the computing capacity you actually use, and can scale up or down within minutes as demand changes, rather than buying servers months in advance based on a guess about future traffic. This is a major part of why the cost of starting a tech company has fallen so dramatically compared to a generation ago.

A nuance beginners often miss: “the cloud” is not some abstract, placeless thing — it’s real physical data centers in specific countries, and where those data centers sit affects real things like how fast your app loads for local users, known as latency, and which country’s data privacy laws apply to your users’ information, known as data residency.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

Google Cloud opened its first Philippines-based cloud region, in Manila, in 2024 — a real, verifiable milestone that gives Philippine startups a local option for hosting and cloud infrastructure, rather than relying solely on regions like Singapore, which had been the default for most Philippine tech companies before this.

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