What is “the Cloud”?

During the first ever Expansão Telecommunications Forum (Expansão is an angolan economics newspaper)I spoke to a few people about hosting services. During our conversation, an angolan service provider employee said:

We have cloud hosting in our data center, why don’t you host your services there?

I knew that provider didn’t really offer cloud services but that started a battle in my mind since while I knew the services from that provider were not really cloud, I couldn’t explain why.

So, what is the cloud? Continue reading