One of the clearest explanations of cloud computing for the uninitiated I have seen so far:
"There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."
The cloud provides the network for you. Admittedly the network has been slow to move itself into the "aaS" crowd since we haven't quite figured out yet how to provide a Newtork as a Service. But for the purposes of a layman's description of cloud computing, the cloud takes care of the networking for you.
I'm a little confused as to what has actually changed here. Did they just stop running things off their own machines and start paying someone else to host the site?
I actually work for the company who did a lot of the original work for recovery.gov and carried out the transition of the production environment to the cloud. I am not exactly sure why it's still resolving to Saavis as another reply points out, but it's probably some sort of DNS TTL issue. Recovery.gov is hosted on Amazon EC2.
"There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."