Based on consumers of the services 

This demographic is also extremely well known. Depending on who the cloud is created for, or who is allowed to use the services from a cloud, they can be categorized into three types:

• Public: Anyone is allowed to access 
• Private: A certain set of users are allowed to access 
• Community: A group of similar enterprises are allowed to access 

This is easily understood by using a road analogy. A highway for example, can be used by everyone, thereby making it public. A road inside the grounds of a palace would be considered a private road. A road inside a gated community would be considered a community road. 

Now, since we have that out of the way, let us take a look at a few examples: 

• Public cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP, RackSpace (OpenStack), and so on 
• Private cloud: Company X's vRealize Environment 
• Community cloud: AWS government clouds and so on 

As you will have realized, the three demographics are not mutually exclusive, which means we can use all three terms in order to describe the type of cloud.