[freeopinion]

If I can open an app, spin up some VMs, pipeline a deployment to them and extend my operational footprint in 10 minutes, I'm not sure I care whether you want to call that cloud or not. I've seen that in some pretty small environments.

[ransackdev]

Yeah honestly some ipmi, cloudinit and (insert config management flavor of the week here) has been spinning up “private clouds” for decades with ease in large shops and in single server shops. We’ve had private clouds since the first person ran ssh commands against someone else’s dedicated metal in some dc.

The cloud is just “someone else’s computer”, not “someone else’s commercially available aws compatible api suite of service offerings that is operating against someone else’s computer”