In this No Dumb Questions, Phoebe is joined by Stack Overflow’s tech lead for the infrastructure team, Josh Zhang, who manages all of our cloud infrastructure. He teaches her about cloud computing and data centers, the difference between CPUs and GPUs, and what it actually took to migrate Stack Overflow to the cloud.

Phoebe Sajor: Josh can you tell me in the simplest terms…what is cloud computing?

Josh Zhang: In the simplest term: someone else's computer. So historically people would run their own data centers. That would mean you would have to rent a space from a company, manage your own internet, and then manage your own racks, buy your hardware, all that refresh cycle. So it required a lot of specialization. You needed a hardware engineer. Then you need somebody to lay software onto the hardware. You need purchasing contracts. All very cumbersome for somebody who's trying to start up or somebody that doesn't want to manage that and be stuck to a location.…