Re: Gartner in the title of the article...
Some techies have indeed been saying for years that "cloud" only equates to "someone else's computers, somewhere". But it's only true in the same sense that a house equates to bricks.
If you're talking about manually standing up VMs and storage in a datacenter through an API or web console, maybe. Although too many companies seem to screw up building and running internal clouds that try to do even that.
But really, what is driving people to cloud providers is access to a huge number - Amazon have 160+ - of highly automated services, all integrated into the same logging, monitoring, billing and identity/access infrastructure and very often into each other as well. Container management, ESBs, data warehouses, SDN, API gateways, VDI farms, call centre infrastructure, software development tooling, ML model lifecycle management, virtual HSMs, machine learning based PII classification, scale-out graph database, managed PostgreSQL, mobile app identity management - too many to sensibly enumerate on a single web page.
These - most of which are at least reasonable, some best in class - are all available for distributed teams to use and manage in 60+ datacentres in tens of countries. With largely good documentation and no need to file a ticket and wait for weeks to get going (or months, if someone has dropped the ball on capacity management). And which can be completely reproducibly stood up via a bit of Terraform - subject to appropriate governance, of course.
If you can point me to a corporate IT department that offers anything close to those 160+ services, with a similar experience, I'll concede it's just other people's computers. I suspect you'll struggle, because the cloud providers probably invested more into R&D for just one of those services than your entire IT budget for the last few years. There are massive economies of scale in automation - cottage industries within enterprises will just struggle to compete.
Of course cloud is just a tool though, and maintains many of the inherent issues with technology - I agree with that. It's just it does solve a useful number of those issues.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
