Thinking about individual computers will lead you astray. There are, rather, sets of machines (from single boxes to entire data-centers) that are managed by a given sysadmin staff. The more machines they manage, the more likely it is that problems will have institutionalized and operationalized solutions.

A cloud is just a sysadmin staff with a Sufficiently Large Deployment to have ironed out all the kinks in their hardware.

Or the more likely they'll not do advanced stuff in order to increase profit, as long as there is a microscopic delta better than running it yourself for most customers most of the time on average. The microscopic delta may not be measurable or noticeable by the end users of course.

Assuming their business model isn't assuming an infinite supply of future customers so in the short term as long as revenue per customer exceeds cost of sales per customer we're all good, etc. Support costs that exceed average cost of sales must be beaten down/ignored, otherwise its cheaper to let them go and have sales "earn" a replacement customer.

Finally their sysadmins work for them to meet their corporate objectives of various meaningless metrics which have no necessity of aligning in any way with your own corporate objectives.

> A cloud is just a sysadmin staff with a Sufficiently Large Deployment to have ironed out all the kinks in their hardware.

By that definition, I don't think there are any clouds.

True, by the literal definition. I continue to interpret "cloud" as "that mysterious part in the middle of the diagram which is a clean encapsulation of Somebody Else's Problem that never bothers you"; obviously, there are no true "clouds" (and there cannot be) by that definition.

But people can try, and they can get close; and one can say that something is a cloud to the degree that it manages to fulfill the "amorphous shape in your diagram you don't have to worry about" promise. So there are some 80%-clouds, some 95%-clouds, some 99.995%-clouds, and so on.

The point I was trying to make is that the degree to which a cloud achieves that promise is correlated to the size (and longevity, and homogeneity) of the deployment. The more man-years have gone into taking care of a given server type at a given DC, the more institutional knowledge is ready-at-hand to solve a problem on your machine of that type, and so the fewer issues become emergencies that break out of the "cloud" abstraction to require your attention.

And it was a reply to the parent precisely because a security problem is just such an "emergency" that represents a failure of institutional knowledge: I would much sooner trust AWS's KMS to not leak my private keys than I would trust a machine I was running myself to not leak my private keys. I'm a much worse sysadmin than AWS!

This is true but not relevant to the parent comment's concerns about security/privacy.