[incision]

>But, it's fun to point at "elastic" and tell people they're "doing it wrong" because they don't take a name chosen 7 years ago literally.

It's not an arbitrary name, elasticity is a defining concept of "cloud".

>As if somehow the service (called EC2 virtually everywhere -- not Elastic Cloud Compute) could never evolve beyond that initial use case.

EC2 is one tool. There are other tools in the Amazon box for other use cases [0] and other boxes from other providers entirely.

>Incidentally, the "elastic" in EBS must have a different meaning because one of its primary selling points is that it's persistent storage.

It's elastic because you can allocate and deallocate rapidly and pay only for what's allocated at a given time.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819017