"There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer"

I don't understand this statement. Could someone please explain.

Every "cloud" is just a server. A server is a computer.

Someone already explained it:

Literally what the guys above me said!

Any questions left?

Does any files from a regular user get saved on another regular user's personal computer?

There are solutions that work like that...
You reserve, lets say 10gb of your drive, 100000 people do that

Then the system stores the blocks of your files with storage magic redundantly on all the hosts and if one country decides to flip the internet switch off, you may still be fine, since you have a distributed system

But know, that this is not the default cloud strategy

@emyu10 not a "regular" user. But there is still another physical machine that contains your data and you have no control over what happens there. This is what the statement says.

@JustKidding I think I like your explanation. It's trying to say that there is no magical cloud of storage, which doesn't fail, right?

@emyu10 exactly. In the end it's all just hard drives with your data on it.

@emyu10 There never is anything magical. At the end everything has to be done with the technology available today.

For people who don't understand the technology, it seems magical. But that's true ever since mankind has left the trees.

Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Btw: with storage i meant, chopping your data in blocks, encrypting, error checking, redundantly saving the data

Usually cloud has multiple implications for software development
One is, that you need to differentiate the components of your app, like front-end/backend/data storage (database)

And you want everything except the data storage to be non persistent... You should be able to kick away one instance of your front-end units and your system starts a new instance if needed, without human interaction

This also means a huge mind change in seing your servers...
You have kettle, not pet...
If you try to use the possibility of cloud, you don't treat your server, you shoot it in the head, analyse it's carcas, cure the problem and deploy

This is hard, very hard to archieve, yet worth aspiring imo.