> It’s called cloud because it’s not in your own data center. Usually cloud symbols were used in network diagrams to depict systems/networks outside of our concern.

That might be true historically, because the only way you could get resources provisioned on-demand via an API from someone else who'd built it. You had to run in someone else's datacenter to get the capability which you actually wanted.

Times have changed. Now, businesses think about "Cloud compute" as being synonymous with "on-demand", "elastic" etc. Where the actual silicon lives is merely an after-thought.

> Also you could don’t really get elasticity with a system like this. If anything, that would be the operative bit for me.

Buy enough of them and you will :)