It could be their own cloud. I refer to my VPSes as “the cloud” even though that’s still self-hosting. My “cloud storage” would just be a 10TB storage VPS I’ve got.
That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t tell if it’s an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.
Broadly, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer. VPSes still fall into that definition. A lot of VPS providers describe themselves as “cloud” now too (eg one of the main hosts I use, HostHatch, describes themselves that way on their site).
If a single AWS EC2 or Lightsail server (which is essentially just a VPS in one region) is considered to be “in the cloud”, why not a much cheaper, more powerful server with a different provider?
I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.
However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.
With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.
With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.
With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.
I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.
Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.
And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.
It could be their own cloud. I refer to my VPSes as “the cloud” even though that’s still self-hosting. My “cloud storage” would just be a 10TB storage VPS I’ve got.
No one else uses the term “cloud” like that.
That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can’t tell if it’s an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.
Broadly, “the cloud” is just someone else’s computer. VPSes still fall into that definition. A lot of VPS providers describe themselves as “cloud” now too (eg one of the main hosts I use, HostHatch, describes themselves that way on their site).
If a single AWS EC2 or Lightsail server (which is essentially just a VPS in one region) is considered to be “in the cloud”, why not a much cheaper, more powerful server with a different provider?
Nextcloud can be selfhosted
My interpretation of “cloud provided media storage” in the context of self-hosting is something like seaweedfs.
I use “my personal cloud” all the time. But that’s just me.
I got another one. Self hosted but tunneled through cloudflare
I don’t like the use of the word cloud, makes it sound like some mystical virtual environment in the sky that anyone can use and it just works.
It’s someone else’s computer, nothing more
I broadly agree that “cloud” has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.
However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.
With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.
With a VPS, I still have “a VPS”. It’s virtualized, yeah, but I don’t normally deal with them dynamically.
With something like AWS, I’m thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.
I think that it’s reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.
Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don’t think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.
And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.