Is every remote server a cloud server?
In: 4
No, but it could be.
What confuses people about “the cloud” is that it doesn’t describe a technology or a kind of device, but is more of an abstract classification for organizational reasons. Imagine that you are in a company meeting and you are trying to plan out the infrastructure for some computer system you want to create. All this is getting diagrammed on a whiteboard. You need to do billing for example which means you need to figure out what things you need to buy, what rooms you need to dedicate to hardware, what wires you need to run in your buildings, what workstations need to go on desks, etc. A lot of that is stuff you need to work out the specifics on, like you need 30 workstations with certain specifications, etc.
Other stuff though you might want to not need to handle. You expect to have 200 gigabytes of billing information which you need to be accessible somehow but instead of building out a server room and all the associated hardware, hiring one or more people to manage it, etc… Instead you just plan to pay some service to do it for you. There are plenty of companies that build massive server farms and will rent you out some space on their server racks for whatever you need to run or store, and you can even scale it up or down as needed without all the cost of doing it yourself. All those details get put into a big lumpy bubble on your whiteboard to sum it all up. 200 gigs goes into “the cloud” where the service handles all the details of making it available for your use.
So you see it isn’t really appropriate to run around trying to point at a specific device and say “I found it, this is the cloud!” Instead “the cloud” is a way of describing a service taking the place of a section of infrastructure. For the provider of that service what is “the cloud” to their customers is infrastructure they need to build out and manage which means to them it is not “the cloud”.
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