Is FaaS required to have an official "Cloud"?

Question

I'm in the process of refining my DevOps skills, but my "Cloud" is more like a lot of scripted virtual machines and monitoring the system. For example, if I have Oracle VM Server, and I install Ansible, Docker, Kubernetes, etc., and I can do CI, provision VMs, containers, monitoring with Elastic...does that qualify as a Cloud?

What I might provision:

Developer needs CI. The developer uses Team Foundation Server which has CI calling Jenkins or something else, deploying.

Developer's App starts getting hit, a lot, hey, we need x, I scale up with more powerful VM. I scale out if the application is engineered to allow it. Database scaling, sharding, caching more, indexes, the whole DBA part.

*To me this is more DevOps. You understand both Dev and Ops world and know when Ops can't help anymore per se, and when an application needs engineering.

There are other things with the scripting and log monitoring.

But, I do not have true Cloud software like Azure, Oracle Cloud, and I don't have Faas.

I don't want to misrepresent myself as a Cloud Engineer or like title.

Answer 1

Google’s free computing course says:

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology created a definition of cloud, although, there is nothing US specific about it. Here it is, cloud computing is a way of using I.T. that has these five equally important traits. First, you get computing resources on-demand and self-service. All you have to do is use a simple interface and you get the processing power, storage, and network you need, with no need for human intervention. Second, you access these resources over the net from anywhere you want. Third, the provider of those resources has a big pool of them and allocates them to customers out of that pool. That allows the provider to get economies of scale by buying in bulk and pass the savings on to the customers. Customers don't have to know or care about the exact physical location of those resources. Fourth, the resources are elastic. If you need more resources you can get more, rapidly. If you need less, you can scale back. And last, the customers pay only for what they use or reserve as they go. If they stop using resources, they stop paying.

This seems to be taken from the document at https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2011/10/final-version-nist-cloud-computing-definition-published

Using DevOps software with virtual machines, with or without containers, can happen without using cloud. In a similar manner, you can open a corporate account on a public cloud and not do DevOps at all. This happens more than we might expect when big companies are migrating legacy systems into the cloud where they simply have sysadmins or other Ops folks use the web interfaces to the cloud IaaS to manually commission VMs that they then manually configure. I have met teams that are convinced that they are doing DevOps when they are simply doing Ops with a few specialist Cloud Engineers who handle setting Virtual Private Cloud (VPS) meaning private connectivity into the cloud (e.g, VPN or a dedicated connection) and IAM (Identity and Access Management).

IMHO cloud and devops are most definitely not the same thing but are at their best when combined.