The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).
This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:
As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.
but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.
Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:
Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data centre.
but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.
yeah, you do know journalists sometime do simplify things, either because the author itself created simplified version of reality in their head, or they understand the complexity, but decided to simplify it to get the point across to the reader, right?
The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).
This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:
but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.
Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:
It also refers to a computer scientist that explains the outage yet never references this scientist at all.
Clarissa, clearly.
sits back down in rocking chair
…well there’s her problem: she’s still running US-EAST-1 on an amiga 500 in 2025…
yeah, you do know journalists sometime do simplify things, either because the author itself created simplified version of reality in their head, or they understand the complexity, but decided to simplify it to get the point across to the reader, right?
They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.
there is no cloud, it is always someone else’s computer. the only difference is “it is successful buzzword”
“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.
Hence the buzzword part of my comment