@floe

You are doing research on distributed computing, by your use of the marketing term Cloud Services then you may be using a kubernetes (or compatible management system) with pods, hopefully built with your own custom OCI containers) providing micro services distributed across a server farm. To provide maximum horizontal scalability. You can distribute further but you will run into latency issues quite often if your distances between farms are significant. You will see the fractures we see more and more often with services like Cloud Flare.

Decades ago Microsoft tried to push SAS (sometime called saas) Software As a Service. It did not go over well because people saw what it was and did not want to pay for every process their computer ran. So SAS went pretty quite though their were some adopters. Next thing you know we were getting emails about the latest thing, and MS does not want us to know, The Cloud! Dude, it is not a cloud, it is just someone else's computer, called a server. The Cloud is just SAS rebranded to sound better for the consumer.

I do understand that today's younger professionals probably feel like terms like Cloud Services is a technology though it is not. It is a marketing term just like Software As a Service. I know I am being persnickety, I get that way 😉. I also really do not like it when IT professionals refer to server farms, distributed computing, and micro services by the Marketing name for them when they are supposed to be developers, software engineers, software architects, etc. They should learn the terms of their science and stop leaning into marketing terms. It makes us sound ignorant and hurts our character. I know there are a lot of kids that grew up with that marketing term that have a different opinion about this topic. That is due to our society leaning more and more into monetizing everything and marketing overlapping into other fields. In my opinion.

Ask yourself "why do we have terms?" Natural language is complicated, it has idioms, metaphors, demographic specific nomenclature. If I tell you that is bad, is not good or is it great? It could go either way and you have no idea without context. Science uses terms to avoid this kind of ambiguity. If a doctor says they need a cat scan no one starts searching for fleas on the cat in the alley 😉. They know what he means. Because scientific terminology is not flexible. DOS may mean Denial Of Service in Networking though in Systems Administration it Means Disk Operating System (An operating system loaded from a disk and not stored in non volatile memory or loaded for tape TOS Tape Operating System (yeah we had those once upon a time 😉 )). They have only one meaning in either domain and they do not overlap. A term has one meaning and only one meaning it is not negotiable. That would suck for poetry, but works well when communication is a must and cannot rely on abstractions to be interpreted based on some obscure connotation.

When we start polluting our terminology by allowing marketing names to overlap into our technology with flamboyant catchy phrases we lose our continuity. Our terms become ambiguous. At one time we could precisely tell you the difference between what was scripting versus what was programming because they were terms. Now those terms have been so abused and misused even few professionals really know the difference. Ask yourself "what is a Cloud Service" you could give several possible acceptable answers. This is the first sign that it is not a term. Terms, in their domain, only have one meaning, it is not negotiable. If it was it would not be a term.

Okay, I could rant on, but honestly you likely stopped reading a few paragraphs ago. I just got home from work, I am tired and I am going to get some rack. You take care and great luck with your project. Personally I am working on adding real moderation to Friendica, as I like the platform far better than Mastodon. I just do not care for micro blogging and you probably have already guessed that 😉.

Take care man, who cares what one old man thinks, just call it whatever makes you feel good about yourself. Though do not be surprised when older scientists cringe at your broken terminology. You cannot make everyone happy, so you might as well make yourself happy 😉.

Have a Great Day!