> I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. …unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud"

> I wouldn't say that renting managed servers is simple at scale. …unless they are not physical servers but vservers. Hetzner, for instance, has such a "cloud" offering where you can dynamically spin up new vservers via an API/Terraform. They represent yet another point on the spectrum but are not "fully cloud" yet if we take "fully cloud" to mean that, beyond hardware, the software stack is partly managed by a third party, too. Put differently, to me the spectrum looks more or less like this: - On-prem self-hosting (own data center, own hardware etc.) - (Off-prem) non-managed hosting (data center provided by third party, but you're providing the server hardware and put it in one of their racks) - Managed hosting of physical servers (data center + server hardware provided by third party) - Managed hosting of vservers (Hetzner Cloud, AWS EC2, …) - "Full cloud": Software stack is partly managed by 3rd party (e.g. managed Postgres, managed Kafka, managed ElasticSearch, serverless, etc.)