[gregmac]

I think he's right in terms of deployment scenarios.

In contrast, the "old style" was to setup a physical server manually: install the OS, install all the dependencies for your application, configure everything manually. If you need to scale out or replace a broken server, you repeat these steps. There are of course various levels of automation that can be done with this, but dealing with physical severs meant at least some manual effort was always required.

In this case, I read "cloud optimized" as you can easily deploy to the typical "cloud" server instance or container (which is basically an installed OS with enough config to get it on the network). Your application doesn't have any dependencies: for example, .NET Core (framework) is bundled.