Public cloud platforms, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, pool resources in data centers often distributed around the globe, and users access them via the internet. Resources are provided to customers through metered services, and the cloud vendor is responsible for varying degrees of back-end maintenance.

Private clouds are walled-off environments hosted in a corporate data center or a colocation facility. They lack the massive scale of public clouds. But they do have some elasticity, and a company’s developers and administrators can still use self-service portals to access resources. In theory, private clouds provide greater control and security, though it’s up to a company’s IT team to ensure that happens

Public clouds charge on a per-use basis, so costs will vary wildly based on multiple variables, including the size of your environment, the provider, the region you operate in, the amount of data movement and the number of higher-level services consumed.