Stop saying the cloud is just someone else's computer, because it's not

But the cloud IS someone else's computer. I don't own it. So if I put my data in the public cloud then by definition it is on someone else's computer.

You can extol and iterate the virtues as much as you want. You can provide guarantees and demonstrate all sorts of benefits. In the end, the general cloud computing environment is still not yours: it is someone else's computer. Even if you are renting it.

Which is fine. Sometimes that is good. Sometimes not so good. Sometimes you want the flexibility of spinning up a few hundred or thousand hours of server time on machines you don't have to own. Other times you want a private cloud.

I've worked several projects where a private on-site cloud was significantly cheaper to operate than a public cloud. The in/out costs smashed the cloud savings. Flip side, a project needed to be able to rapidly spin up machines as needed from a template, public cloud was the only way.

I think the phrase 'the cloud is not your computer' is actually useful, since literally it is true and forces people to consider that they should be careful with data management since all that data stored on the cloud is being managed by a third party.

> The simplest definition of cloud is a data centre that's full of identical hardware that no-one ever touches except to unpack it on day one and throw it away when it fails;

The hardware, yes.

> in between, every deployment, update, investigation, and management process is automated.

Well, that's simple not true. Maybe most if it is automated but not every.

And the thing that the author doesn't understand is that I don't own the hardware, I don't ownbthe software and I don't own the data that's in the server, even if the data is about me.

It is almost like renting an apartment but every furniture I buy and put in it becames property of the apartment owner and I only have some pseudo-rights about them.

The cloud may not be just someone’s else’s computer, but someone else’s computer (and other material) is certainly involved. When my career began, the word we used was “outsourcing”.

There are advantages and disadvantages to outsourcing, or to using the cloud, and a cost benefits analysis needs to be done on a case by case basis. I don’t believe that’s changed much over the last thirty or so years, although the details regarding the exact pros and cons has certainly changed.