Public Cloud

A cloud computing model that provides services over the public internet and shared across organizations.

A public cloud is a cloud computing environment where infrastructure and services are owned and operated by a third-party cloud provider and shared across multiple organizations (tenants). Resources are delivered over the public internet and billed on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing organizations to avoid upfront capital expenditure on hardware.

Major public cloud providers include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Cloudflare. Public clouds offer a wide range of services including compute, storage, databases, networking, AI, and serverless platforms. Multi-tenant resource sharing enables economies of scale that drive down costs for individual customers.

Public clouds are the most common hosting environment for APIs and serverless applications. API gateways deployed on public cloud infrastructure benefit from the provider's global network, built-in security features, and managed services. Serverless API gateways on public clouds eliminate capacity planning entirely, scaling automatically to handle any traffic volume and charging only for actual usage.