Now that you know more about the different services you can host on a cloud provider, let's talk about how to make the most of the cloud for your organization. As we've mentioned in previous lessons, when we say that a service is running in the cloud, we mean that it's running somewhere else, either in a data center or in other remote service. These data centers house a large assortment of machines, and different types of machines are used for different services. For example, some machines may have local Solid State Drive, SSD for increased performance, while others may rely on virtual drives mounted over the network to lower costs. When you use Software as a Service or SaaS, the software is already pre-configured and the user isn't deeply involved in the cloud configuration. If you choose a cloud email solution like gmail, a cloud storage solution like Dropbox or a cloud productivity suite like Microsoft Office 365, there are only a small number of options for you to select or customize. The cloud provider manages everything related to the service for you including; deciding whether VMs are hosted, ensuring that it has enough capacity to serve your needs, forming back as frequently and reliably and more. When you use Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS on the other hand, you're hosting your own services in the cloud. You need to decide how you want the infrastructure to look depending on what you want to run on it. For example, you need to decide which of the many available machine types you'll use and what kind of storage they'll need. Pro tip. Start small, then select more powerful instances as needed. When you set up cloud resources, you need to consider regions. A region is a geographical location containing a number of data centers. Each of these data centers is called a zone, and each zone is independent of the others. If one of them fails for some reason, the others are still available and services can be migrated without visibly affecting users. Large cloud providers usually offer their services in lots of different regions around the world, and which region you choose will mostly depend on where your users are located. Smaller cloud providers may offer fewer regions but they may be the only provided with the availability in your city or country. It doesn't matter where exactly the data center is located, but users may experience more latency if it's further away from them. You may also hear about public, private and hybrid clouds. The public cloud is what we call cloud services provided to you by a third party. The name refers to the fact that the cloud providers offers services to the public. When your company owns the services and the rest of your infrastructure, whether on-site or in a remote data center, we call that the private cloud. And the hybrid cloud is a mixture of both public and private cloud. Some workloads are run on servers owned by your company, while others are run on servers owned by a third party. The trick to making the most of the hybrid cloud is ensuring that everything is integrated smoothly, so you can access, migrate, and manage data seamlessly no matter where it's hosted.