Types of Computing Environments

Cloud computing: a collective use of software and hardware to deliver services over a network, especially the internet, giving users access to data and information anywhere, anytime. Categorized into public, private, community and hybrid networks, providing services as infrastructure, platform or software as a service.
Advantages: lower cost, available 24/7 from any device, flexible capacity, automated software updates, high security and easily managed.

Disadvantages: lack of personnel expertise, difficult to fix what you can’t see, and a lack of options.
Time sharing environment: allows multiple users to share a system simultaneously, with each user given a time slice as the processor switches rapidly among them.
Client server environment: the client requests a resource and the server provides it; a server may serve multiple clients at once, while a client is in contact with only one server.
Personal computing environment: a single computer system where all processing is done for one user.
Distributed computing environment: contains multiple physically separate nodes linked together over a network, communicating with each other and handling processes in tandem; each node holds a small part of the distributed OS.
Cluster computing environment: similar to parallel computing since both have multiple CPUs, but a clustered system is created by two or more individual computer systems merging together to work in parallel.