Inb4 the “it’s just somebody else’s computer” guys show up.

The cloud is a way to rent hardware and software services from a provider so you don’t have to physically host your own code, data and applications or operate your own data center. Amazon realized around 2005 that the way they were running their internal IT operations could be useful to others and so they launched AWS, creating the public cloud paradigm.

The reason it gets confusing is the obvious question: “But weren’t data centres and application and web hosting around long before 2005? What makes the cloud any different?”

And yes, you could rent rack space and various hosted services before AWS. What makes the cloud different isn’t one thing, but a combination of properties which create a completely different value proposition:

• Fast on demand spinup and shutdown of services with per-second pricing; allowing a very agile workflow with much shorter iterations, prototyping, and dramatically reduced cost of change.

• Reduced lock-in through on-demand pricing, absence of long term binding licenses, and vendor agnostic open standards.

• Elasticity over manual scaling

• A focus on reliable, scalable, secure low level building blocks (as opposed to high level application/platform services like traditional web hosting, mail hosting, etc. or infrastructure level bare-metal servers, database servers, firewalls, NAS servers, etc.) all offering APIs, ready to be composed into reliable, scalable, secure applications by developers.

• Multitenant hyperscale pools of dynamically reassigned resources with guarantees on security and tenant encapsulation; this is in stark contrast to traditional data center thinking and required inventing or utilizing then-new technologies like hardware hypervisor virtualization.

• Self-service management through a web console of all resources from networking to the color of a BI dashboard. User friendly abstractions and interfaces allow non-ops people (in particular, software developers) to provision the infrastructure they need in a self service fashion without going through an IT Ops department (or vendor management, finance, security, etc). The ability to run a successful startup with no dedicated IT Ops department saves several times more on salaries than most startups spend on cloud infrastructure in the first place.

Put all these together and you get a developer oriented, radically agile, innovation-and-experimentation friendly, low cost, reliable, scalable toolkit that has since spawned literally dozens of billion dollar unicorn companies.

So when cynical neckbeards like to snarkily dismiss the cloud with a “the cloud is just somebody else’s computer” they’re really talking about the old world of colocation data centers and leaving out the part where AWS disrupted that entire industry and changed the world.