Overview of the economic activity of cloud providers and research on the theoretical foundations of cloud computing

Introduction. Cloud services have become an integral part of all modern companies, contributing to business development, providing flexibility and scalability and accelerating business operations, the need to use cloud services will only grow in an environment where everything is constantly changing. With services such as data storage, computing power, and application hosting on the Internet, companies of all sizes can gain a competitive advantage.Providers that provide cloud services offer enterprises several advantages over the traditional approach in the organization of IT infrastructure. For example, one of the main types of cloud services is SaaS, or Software-as-a-Service, this model allows companies to pay only for what they use. This gives certain advantages over the use of its own iron, which requires a significant initial investment and ongoing costs to maintain the system in working order. The flexibility that can be provided by using the services of cloud providers is the ability to scale as needed both vertically, improving cloud hardware configurations, and horizontally, increasing the number of computing machines, it is obvious that such scaling attempts in companies that use their own architecture await significant investments and costs.The purpose of the study is to review the economic activities of cloud service providers, research and study the main aspects of cloud services and describe the basic definitions of cloud computing.Methods are based on the system-logical generalization of the content essence of theoretical aspects regarding the use of cloud services.Results. As a result of the study, definitions and recommendations for using the services of cloud providers were provided. The impact of cloud technologies on business and key performance metrics of software product development were analyzed. The practice of using the services of cloud providers by companies from the IT sector and other industries was studied. In addition, an example of the practical use of a cloud database was developed, using the example of database initialization, which demonstrates the practicality and speed of the process.Prospects. Further research will be aimed at the practical development of an application that uses cloud computing and services of cloud functions, such as authorization and authentication of system and database users.