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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

This was years ago but fun story:

Buddy of mine worked at a big bank and was required to use IBMs "cloud".

He went to try spinning up a server just to get familiar with the UI. The UI was weird to do so and he got a message to check his email... nothing on the page but that.

He checks his email and it looked like his action fired off an automated email that was responded to by an automated email that the server would be setup in a week or so....like some old colocation service... that was their cloud...

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I’m guessing that was a corporate approval thing, with any new resources requiring approval by a human.

Cloud is a very ambiguous term. To me a cloud is the abstraction of resources, scaling of which can be done on a colocation basis aswell.

I'm sure provisioining resources within the supplied hardware would be fast as any, and maintains privacy by default for apps where others can charge up to $40/hour/instance

This is the key thing. Previous to 'cloud' as a customer, you'd pre-pay for X amount of rack space, plus energy usage, and if not providing your own kit, X amount of hardware. And then there was the separate billing for management (basically hands-on reboots, or kit recabling). Then there was the (often separate) arrangement for secure network access from your offices to the data centres.

Cloud got rid of all of that. These days you sign a contract, and cherry pick what resources you need from a shopping list, and it's all provisioned in the background, and then deprovisioned when you don't need it anymore. Behind the scenes its all the same stuff it used to be, but now it's all wrapped up in a single service.

Companies love cloud because it means they no longer need a large infrastructure team to manage the server stuff which is a saving, along with the more fluid pricing model - also a saving.

And that's just if you were a real business. If you were just a little guy trying to build stuff for fun, you had to run a server at home or buy a shell somewhere that would let you run your services.

Your experience is very strange. Their cloud is very popular in gaming and other industries. You should be able to spin up hardware servers or compute vms within minutes.

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