You Can Stop Saying “Cloud,” But You Can’t Take the Cloud Out
What a difference a week makes.
I’ve barely unpacked from AWS re:Invent and I’m still hearing that familiar Vegas slot-machine soundtrack in my head — though this year the reels didn’t read BAR-BAR-BAR so much as AI-AI-AI. Agentic AI, generative AI, fine-tuned AI, AI infrastructure, AI copilots … if you could slap “AI” on it, someone was demoing it. And to be clear, none of this surprised me. As I wrote on DevOps.com and said in last week’s Shimmy Says, this was always going to be the All AI, All the Time re:Invent.
But what did surprise me was something that wasn’t said.
For an event synonymous with cloud — THE cloud show — AWS themselves didn’t seem all that eager to use the actual word cloud. Sure, there were plenty of announcements relevant to DevOps, cloud native, and platform engineering. Plenty. But the term itself? Hardly the star of its own party.
And then came the second data point, the one that sealed the deal for me.
Business Insider published an article about Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff — arguably the original Cloud Evangelist — floating the idea of renaming Salesforce to Agentforce. Why? Because according to their marketing research, the word “cloud” doesn’t resonate with buyers anymore, but “agentic AI” does.
Let that sink in. Marc. Benioff. The man who practically tattooed “No Software” and “Cloud” onto the enterprise psyche. Now openly musing that the cloud brand might be stale.
If Benioff is ready to replace the word “cloud” with something sexier, you can forgive me for wondering if my friends at PlatformEngineering.org will show up at the next conference sporting t-shirts that say: “Cloud Is Dead”
“The rebranding impulse is understandable, but it risks obscuring where the real leverage comes from,” according to Mitch Ashley, VP & Practice Lead at Futurum Research. “Agentic systems are not replacing the cloud. They are expanding what the cloud makes possible. The platforms that succeed in this cycle will be the ones that treat AI as an extension of cloud-native design, not a break from it. The terminology may evolve, but the underlying architecture remains the engine that carries the industry forward.”
Folks, paraphrasing the words of Mark Twain:
“The reports of clouds’ death have been greatly exaggerated.”
And let me emphasize — GREATLY.
Because if there’s one thing we learned both at re:Invent and from the broader enterprise ecosystem, it’s this:
You can stop mentioning the cloud, but you can’t take the cloud out.
The Cloud has Entered its “Taken for Granted” Era
Sometimes technology becomes so pervasive, so reliable, so embedded in how we work and live that it fades into the background. Electricity. GPS. Broadband. Containerization. Kubernetes. And yes, cloud.
Cloud has moved so deep into the woodwork of modern IT that marketers think they can stop saying the word without consequence. They can rebrand, rename, reposition — but they’re doing so from towers built entirely on the cloud they’re supposedly leaving behind.
Let’s be blunt:
Agentic AI doesn’t exist without cloud.
Full stop. The compute footprint is too large, the scaling too dynamic, the energy profile too intense, the data pipelines too massive.
Every frontier model we talk about today—from GPT to Gemini to Grok to Claude—was trained, fine-tuned, hosted, or orchestrated through cloud-scale infrastructure.
And those trillion-dollar “AI factory” announcements? Guess what powers them. Guess what cools them. Guess what networks them. Guess what makes them accessible to developers around the globe?
It ain’t magic. It’s cloud.
The Growth Continues — Quietly, Steadily, Relentlessly
No need to invent numbers or cite fictional research. But here’s what is publicly known and widely reported:
- All three major hyperscalers — AWS, Azure and Google Cloud — are still growing at healthy double-digit rates year-over-year. Include the Oracle Cloud in there too.
Depending on the quarter, each outpaces or trails the others, but none are shrinking. None is stagnant. None is dying. - Cloudflare and Akamai, which I firmly place under the broader “cloud provider” umbrella, continue to see strong enterprise adoption as the traffic patterns of the AI era put more weight on distributed, edge-aware architectures.
- Nearly every modernization initiative (AI, automation, observability, platform engineering, cloud native transformation, you name it) is either cloud-first or cloud-dependent.
- And while enterprises love to say they’re “repatriating workloads,” the actual net movement still overwhelmingly favors cloud expansion.
The reality is this:
We are in a golden era of cloud — whether the word is spoken or not.
Today’s cloud offers:
- More compute power per dollar
- More specialized silicon
- More network capacity
- More robust financial controls
- More flexibility in consumption models
- More global coverage
- More turnkey primitives that accelerate innovation
And layered on top of all that?
The world’s fastest-growing AI infrastructure backbone.
If this is what “decline” looks like, sign me up.
Cloud Native Still Lives Mostly… in the Cloud
It’s always funny to hear people wax poetic about “Kubernetes anywhere”—on-prem, bare metal, edge devices, space stations, coffee makers. And yes, Cloud Native absolutely transcends the public cloud today.
But here’s the unvarnished truth:
Most cloud native transformations start or mature in public cloud environments.
That’s where teams learn, scale, iterate and experiment.
That’s where platform engineering leaders build internal platforms.
That’s where enterprises refine service meshes, observability pipelines, GitOps workflows and microservices architectures.
Even when workloads move to hybrid or edge, they still anchor themselves in cloud-native paradigms shaped — and often originated — inside the major clouds.
So when people stop saying “cloud,” don’t be fooled. The guts of the operation are still running on it.
Cloud’s Maturity is its Superpower
We’re at a point where the cloud doesn’t need to introduce itself anymore. It walks into the room like a seasoned veteran who isn’t threatened by the shiny new rookie (in this case, Agentic AI) because it knows the stadium was built around its playbook.
The cloud changed:
- How we architect
- How we build
- How we deploy
- How we observe
- How we scale
- How we experiment
- How we democratize access to computing
Just because the industry is infatuated with a new crush doesn’t mean the foundational relationship has ended.
Shimmy’s Take: Don’t Get Too Cute
Marketers are always tempted to chase the hottest trend — and right now, nothing burns hotter than AI. I get it. Every company wants to prove they’re not being left behind. Every CEO wants to sprinkle “agentic AI” into their pitch deck like oregano on pizza.
But here’s my advice:
Do not abandon cloud in your strategic storytelling, your product positioning, or your internal planning.
Cloud may not be the shiny new toy anymore. It may not generate clicks like AI. It may not get the keynote spotlight. But neither does the Internet—and look how important that turned out to be.
The cloud has been one of the most significant engines of progress in the last two decades. It reshaped global business, redefined how teams collaborate, and unlocked entire categories of innovation we now take for granted.
AI — agentic or otherwise — stands on its shoulders.
So sure, jump on the AI wave. Ride it. Shape it. Build with it. Innovate with it.
But don’t forget what’s under the surface keeping you afloat.
Whether you say the word “cloud” or not, you can’t take the cloud out.
And if you try?
Well… let’s just say I’ll be here to write the “I told you so” Op-Ed.
