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Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

This is a good reminder that what we call the public cloud today is actually a misnomer - it’s not actually a public cloud, it’s someone else’s cloud. Just like we used to say the cloud is really just someone else’s computer.

I think people started calling it the public cloud simply because of the scale and seemingly easy access to everyone, where the current clouds are seemingly in open competition with each other.

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The public waterpool is also someone else's pool but it's still public.

Kind of different. The public pool is paid for by taxes and is publicly owned. The public cloud is still privately owned.

My point is that the pool very often is just a private company. All three public pools around me here in central Europe are privately held companies.

>Just like we used to say the cloud is really just someone else’s computer.

I still describe cloud computing as renting someone else's computers.

Not really sure what you mean by misnomer or what an “actual public cloud” would mean. It’s called public cloud to distinguish it from private clouds which plenty of large organizations have. The big cloud providers license their clouds for such deployments. Unless you mean that a “public cloud” should mean something like non-corporate governance?

With things like kubernetes, it’s easier than ever to deploy your own private clouds these days.

I think the only misnomer is the word “cloud” itself. We had the term “hosting providers/companies” which is exactly what these public cloud are. It’s just that the term “hosting provider/company” had about 15 years of precedence that almost always meant “small scale hosting”, so they just came up with a new marketing terms

I mean it in the sense of a "public utility" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

Public has lots of meanings. Here it just means not private.

Public has many meanings. Everyone can buy or access it is a valid meaning and doesn't say anything about ownership.

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