I am totally lost as to how this is a cloud. The author's definition of pocket-sized cloud is "a place to run our code, which can be configured through an API

I am totally lost as to how this is a cloud. The author's definition of pocket-sized cloud is "a place to run our code, which can be configured through an API - using containers for packaging" and that is not what I understand a cloud to be. It doesn't seem to have any of the definitive properties of cloud computing. What am I missing here?