A cloud provider is a company that provides cloud-based services. Services can range from providing virtual storage to renting out virtual servers with GPU chips for high performance computing.
Cloud providers have physical hardware that is located in safe and secure data centers. With the help of virtualization technologies, physical hardware resources are shared among virtual machines. Users can rent individual virtual machines or use services deployed in the cloud on a commercial basis.
The user does not need to monitor the performance of the hardware, license and update the software. The cloud provider takes care of all this.
Virtualization technologies allow configuring virtual machine resources, scaling both data storage space and computing capabilities of the virtual IT infrastructure.