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That was the case ~15+ years ago. Private cloud has been a term for the majority of that time to evoke the elasticity and virtualisation without the "not in your own data center" bit, because to most users of a cloud the operative bit is that they don't have to worry about where the computer is or talk to someone to provision one, not whether it sits in the corporate data centre or off at Amazon.

Hybrid clouds even means devs might not know whether it sits in the corporate data centre or a public cloud, because it could be either/or depending on current capacity.

> Also you could don’t really get elasticity with a system like this. If anything, that would be the operative bit for me.

"You" as in "the organisation as a whole" don't get elasticity. "You" as in "your department" or "you as an individual" do get elasticity.



> "You" as in "the organisation as a whole" don't get elasticity. "You" as in "your department" or "you as an individual" do get elasticity.

Right, but to the degree that you get elasticity, it starts to look more and more like "someone else's computer", no? If multiple people/departments/etc are provisioning virtual instances on one shared cloud infra, with nobody who's using the provisioning API caring about the underlying capacity (and capacity is planned indirectly by forecasting, etc), then it really starts to sound like "someone else's computer" to me. That "someone else" just happens to be another org within the same company.


Yes, that is why we talk about it as a private cloud -- it looks almost exactly like a public cloud to the people actually using it.


So in other words, “Someone else’s datacenter” continues to be a perfect description of what Cloud is.


As long as everyone has a shared understanding of what "someone else's" means, which this thread shows people don't.




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